I know there's discussion around RSS readers every here or there on HN. I'm curious about how many of you (especially those of you who write code) interact with publishing to or subscribing from RSS feeds as part of your work or side projects, and if you have any common pain points or favorite tools/libraries (and if it's something you can share here, please do!).
Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
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Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#2Publishing it, yes. Mostly on my blogs these days, though I used to use RSS to help sales people manage content across a number of websites owned by a wine distributor.
Interacting with it, sure--at a paid service level it's been easy to monitor service updates this way, but not so much at a personal reading level currently. Though you got me thinking...
Last time I was using a reader, I remember struggling to find a Linux desktop RSS reader with discovery features. I have my own OPML that I like & cart around, but it requires a lot of maintenance over time, and using feeds for their current value seems to subvert the fact that a lot of really great blogs are past their heyday (the good stuff is found by going back in time, not so much now & later).
I also thought it'd be cool if there could be a P2P effect with sharing OPML or RSS feeds, like a general catalog. Or let's say a Gutenberg.org mixed with Github for RSS. Find, explore, & remix others' shared feeds. Not sure if such a thing exists.
Almost some random thoughts here, not sure if any of this helps...
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#3I use RSS to follow HN and a few web comics.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#4Yes and yes 1000yes
I seen this post thank to rss
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#5Daily - it's how I got this article.....
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#6RSS is actually the only mechanism that I use to subscribe to any news source, including YouTube channels.
If a news source does not support RSS itself and there is no workaround to get it otherwise as RSS, I will not subscribe to it.
For reading, I use Feedbro in Firefox and Flym on Android.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#7Yes. When Google Reader died I just moved to other apps. I’ve tried a few over the years. Feedly, Inoreader, etc. Also, podcasting still uses RSS. Every podcast app uses it directly, or more often these days, indirectly. iTunes and Spotify podcasts databases are still originally populated from RSS feeds.
As a developer, I mostly use Django, so I use the included syndication framework. The major pain point in that library is that adding additional tags that it doesn’t already support, especially if they are complex, is a pain in the ass. of course, you only have to do it once and then you can re-use your subclass in other projects. It’s still not great. Ideally it would support a very wide range of popular tags out of the box, i.e.: the podcast ones.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#8I use RSS and get all my HN digest (among others) from it, including your post.
I like it because it gives a very clean, simple interface to multiple sources and keeps track of what i've seen.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#9I use RSS daily. Years ago I used Google Reader, then Feedly for a short time and finally settled on Inoreader (free tier) and very happy with it.
I really hope RSS will be kept alive in the future. Feeds are my daily curated source of news, updates to youtube channels etc.
RSS is the only way I subscribe to any news source and I don't think I'm missing on anything.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?
#10I pretty much exclusively use RSS, I saw this post from my RSS reader.
I use NewsBlur. It has a free setting, but I like it so much I pay for the subscription.