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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#91

Post by icebraining »

jakub_g wrote: post #79
fredley wrote: post #8

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of thi…

I stopped using RSS circa 2010 since RSS produces just too much content (well at least my reader did, as it was not archiving stuff until read, just like an email inbox). I was reading my RSS feeds almost as a full-time job and the unread count was only going up and up :) TBH, it's a bit like this now for me with HN and Twitter even without RSS. "This looks interesting... (click)(open in new tab)". One week later: 30…

So what if the unread counts go up? I have a feed with 543 unread items, and many others with 100+. Sometimes I scan the titles of the latest dozens of items, then mark all as read.

For me, that's the advantage of RSS over Twitter: your unread counts are separate for each feed, so that blog that rarely updates but is always worthwhile to read doesn't get lost in the pile of cheap content.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#92

Post by chiefalchemist »

leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Yup. RSS is exactly what it say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in that simplicity is a tool that just works. No wresting with authenication. No "oh shit they updated the API." None of that.

Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#93

Post by icebraining »

ygra wrote: post #58
r3bl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.

... iff you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.

Sorry for the repeated post, but if you have an account, you can subscribe to the channel and then get an OPML file with all the feeds from the Subscriptions Manager page.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#94

Post by icebraining »

b0rsuk wrote: post #89
Artemix wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your question but if you were asking about how we actually store articles and provide such a feed, I can explain how I did it. I made a markdown-based blog with the articles stored in a PgSQL database and, for now, two interfaces: the website, which I kept as lightweight as possible (no external content, no wasted space for ads etc) and a RSS feed, only experimental for now, which gives the…

Okay, my question was ambiguous. I meant: how do users store and organize full articles from RSS feeds ? I used a RSS reader before a hard drive crash, and I made the mistake of subscribing to too many feeds. Aside from cutting unnecessary information overload, how do people organize their "old newspapers" ?

Some readers (e.g. TTRSS) have a "star" button. You can then just click on the feed or category and view only the starred items.

Alternatively, you can use a separate bookmark system, like Pinboard.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#95

Post by KORraN »

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me.

Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say 2 hours ago. I switch to "Most Recent" and guess what, I can't find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person's page).

I'm getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#97

Post by oliwarner »

OJFord wrote: post #71
coldtea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. Huh? There's no such inability.

GP probably meant targeted ads, beyond just 'well if you like this feed,'...

You could have a identifiable feed URL. Static, personalised ads that most feed readers wouldn't block.

And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#98

Post by z92 »

I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single news from each site.

Don't know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#99

Post by icebraining »

Entangled wrote: post #75

The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time. It's just like an email client…

It's interesting, because that has really nothing to do with email or RSS as protocols, it's purely a social convention that daily/weekly aggregations get sent as newsletters rather than published as RSS feeds.

As a counterexample, I follow Leah Neukirchen's Trivium, which is a feed that publishes a weekly post with a bunch of interesting links (mostly tech related). http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro

And of course, there are tools to display emails inboxes as RSS feeds.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#100

Post by aiNohY6g »

KORraN wrote: post #95

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say…

You can 'easily' generate a RSS stream out of Facebook and Twitter (and many other sources), e.g. w/RSS Bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge).
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