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Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

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Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#51

Post by cakes »

pmlnr wrote: post #23
mike-cardwell wrote: post #14

I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don'…

I first used rss2email[1], moved on to writing my own initially as a WP plugin (using the blogroll links to pull from); it gradually evolved into a standalone python thing to support mf2[2] feeds. I do prefer RSS entries as email entries, therefore newletters and RSS feeds are more or less the same to me. [1]: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ [2]: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed

I also initially used rss2email but ended up spinning it slightly for my own needs. It's a excellent tool to get over the first barrier of rss -> email though!

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#52

Post by tedmiston »

criddell wrote: post #38
tedmiston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you take a look at the uBlock log?

I never knew there was a log. So now that I look at it, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Judging by what's red, I think uBlock is mostly stopping the blog from tracking me. Also, the number of blocked requests is now 36. Not sure why it would keep climbing after the page is loaded.

Sometimes people defer loading of unnecessary JavaScript, like trackers, until after the page is "loaded", so that's why you might see the page appear to finish loading then more blocked requests appear in the seconds that follow.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#53

Post by bandrami »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #14

I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don'…

Oddly enough, I have a perl script that checks my "mailing lists" mailbox and turns that to an RSS feed. To each his own...

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#54

Post by olivierlacan »

While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher.

With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least double that of RSS. Possibly even much more.

I've been an RSS user for years and I use it to subscribe to blogs mostly. Despite this, I would never subscribe to the RSS feeds of some of the most popular email newsletters I know and receive.

With Google giving up on the Google Reader years ago, the market for well-designed, easily accessible, and free RSS readers sort of dried up overnight. I use Reeder for macOS, which is a paid (but cheap) app and I know full well this is a power user situation.

I would never expect the overwhelming majority of users to get back on the RSS bandwagon unless browsers made it a first-class feature with a noticeable call-to-action on sites with available RSS feeds, an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked, and a clean reading interface that mirrors what Readability, Instapaper, and others used to provide.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#55

Post by Mithaldu »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #14

I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don'…

I just use Opera 12 which has a great email client that is combined with an RSS client. It just treets RSS updates as slightly different emails.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#56

Post by dwightgunning »

olivierlacan wrote: post #54

While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher. With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least doub…

Exactly. The marketeers and Growth Hackers won the battle.

That discussion around engagement was even had amongst RSS advocates when it came syndicating the full-text vs a summary (really,the lede) of a post/article.

Anybody looking to monetise attention should be focussed on email.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#57

Post by hackuser »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #14

I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don'…

> I prefer to use my email clients to read my news.

Many email clients also handle RSS directly. Thunderbird, for example, is the most responsive RSS reader I've used.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#58

Post by jobigoud »

olivierlacan wrote: post #54

While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher. With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least doub…

> an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked

I'm super happy with RSS and don't want to clutter my inbox.

One difference with e-mail is that sometimes we don't care about some articles, especially on the high volume sites. In an RSS reader it will be bold as unread and this cause anxiety and make it harder to distinguish a newly arrived article vs the most recent unread article.

I feel that for RSS we need three levels of flags: new, unread, read. Or "unread, read title, read article". In an e-mail inbox you will make sure everything is in the read status. In an RSS reader that amounts to too many janitor clicks.

Re: Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

#59

Post by ommunist »

chriswarbo wrote: post #10
ommunist wrote: post #6

Well, you can't effectively kill newsletter. Because newsletter COMES so you, and you have to CLICK to get feed.

It depends what level of abstraction you're working at. At the level of sockets, you're right that a mail server receives a connection from a sender when a newsletter is sent, whilst an RSS aggregator initiates connections to each feed's source when it polls, even if there are no new articles. At a lower level, the server's doing polling to check for new connections, but that's a fast local operation so it doesn't br…

You are quite correct. But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. Emails are ok, everyone 'knows' what the email is? But 'feed'. Can I save it for offline use? Can I forward it to friends and family?
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