31–40 of 54 posts
Does no one find it ironic that one of the complaints about RSS feeds is they don't give you the full content, forcing you to visit the site, while trying to access the poster's web site through reader view gives you a warning that you have to visit the site directly to get the full content?
The future of RSS is "git clone". RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git! Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds. I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.
What problems does that solve? Reading blogs over git clone sounds like re-inventing the wheel. Are there even any tools that do that? If anything were to replace RSS (and Atom) I'd personally hope for h-feed [1] since it's DRYer. But realistically it's going to be hard to eclipse RSS, there's far too much adoption and it is mostly sufficient. [1] https://indieweb.org/h-feed
Can’t say anything about blogs, but the kernel folks actively use mailing list archives over Git[1,2] (also over NNTP and of course mail is also delivered as mail).
The future of RSS is "git clone". RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git! Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds. I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the GP commenter, but I'm supposing there would be some way of announcing the git repo where you can find the source -- similar to the ` ` tag used for RSS, you could have a ..and tooling could take care of all the things you like in an RSS reader. I could see this working really well for static site generators like vitepress or Jekyll or what have you, but going beyond what's in the source is kind of project…
> This is a _great_ idea. Let's make this happen. Edit: okay this is live now in Scroll and across PLDB, my blog, and other sites. Would love if someone could post this link to HackerNews: https://scroll.pub/blog/gitOverRss.html
The future of RSS is "git clone". RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git! Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds. I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.
You clone what? A WordPress database?
You clone static site generated websites.
Scroll is designed for this, but there's no reason other SSCs can't copy our patterns.
Here's a free command line working client you can try [beta]: https://wws.scroll.pub/readme.html
Instead of favoriting feeds, you favorite repos. Then you type "wws fetch" to update all your local repos.
It fetches the branch that contains the built artifacts along with the source, so you have ready to read HTML and clean source code for any transformations or analysis you want to do.
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I love Wordpress, but the WordpressPHPMySQL stack is a drag. At some point I expect they will move the Wordpress brand, community, and frontend to be powered by a static site generator.
To be quite honest, I suspect they'll probably want to use Scroll as their new backend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a _great_ idea. Let's make this happen. Edit: okay this is live now in Scroll and across PLDB, my blog, and other sites. Would love if someone could post this link to HackerNews: https://scroll.pub/blog/gitOverRss.html
I like it, I'm adding this to my sites now, too
The future of RSS is "git clone". RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git! Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds. I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.
horrible simple hack: use `wget` with `--mirror` option, and commit the result to a git repository. Repeat with a `cron` job to keep an archive with change history.
The future of RSS is "git clone". RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git! Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds. I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.
It's not what you're aiming for with this comment, but I bet git would actually make a pretty good storage tool/format for archival of mostly static sites. horrible simple hack: use `wget` with `--mirror` option, and commit the result to a git repository. Repeat with a `cron` job to keep an archive with change history.
This is not to say that this is a good idea or a bad one, but I think you will, long-term, have better luck if people don’t feel their content is being siphoned.
A great case-in-point is what my friends at 404 Media did: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...
They saw that a lot of their content was just getting scraped by random AI sites, so they put up a regwall to try to limit that as much as possible. But readers wanted access to full-text RSS feeds, so they went out of their way to create a full-text RSS offering for subscribers with a degree of security so it couldn’t be siphoned.
I do not think this tool was created in bad faith, and I hope that my comment is not seen as being in bad faith, but: You will find better relationships with the writers you share if you ask rather than just take. They may have reasons for not having RSS feeds you may not be aware of. For example, I don’t want my content distributed in audio format, because I want to leave that option open for myself.
People should have a say in how their content is distributed. I worry what happens when you take those choices away from publishers.
As a publisher who publishes a full-text RSS feed at a time when not a lot of publishers do, I must say: The publisher should have a say in this. This is not to say that this is a good idea or a bad one, but I think you will, long-term, have better luck if people don’t feel their content is being siphoned. A great case-in-point is what my friends at 404 Media did: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-emai…
I love these projects but often they can have a negative side-effects.