It's time to head back to RSS? • Hacker News Board

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#101

Post by pvsukale3 » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:09 AM UTC

I recently added RSS support to my sideproject blogging platform.

https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-fee...

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#102

Post by gboudrias » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

lovelearning wrote: post #83

mosselman wrote: post #76

I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…

They provide feeds, but don't show a link anywhere on the UI (which is strange). [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed...

Not that strange, every site on which I've looked for it has RSS/atom feeds where relevant, but hide them (eg this, github, etc).

Interestingly enough, Firefox has a "feeds" section when looking at page info, which will show RSS feeds included in the meta tags (which they all seem to be).

So really, I've never stopped using RSS, not sure how to go "back" to it. I understand the whole thing with Twitter killing it but as a dev I use RSS as todo lists and that still works wonders.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#103

Post by fiddlerwoaroof » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:14 AM UTC

iamdave wrote: post #40

anomie31 wrote: post #35

Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…

I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion. I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately. So here we are. RSS revival? Bring it on. I…

TinyTinyRSS lets you use xpath to specify which element on the linked page is the “real” content. It was a life-saver when dealing with snippet-only feeds.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#104

Post by mandelbulb » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:16 AM UTC

grayrest wrote: post #84

mosselman wrote: post #76

I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…

> When did RSS go out of style anyway? It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

Not true at all. Alternatives were already available when Google Reader(GR) closed, i.e. July 2013. Inoreader, which was feature-complete in regards to GR, was launched a month after the announcement in March. That's why Feedly hogged most of the momentum as it was released in 2008 already.

I would say Google Reader's discontinuation actually increased the popularity of RSS. The protocol was big news for a few weeks, and it sparked a lot of new services which made news themselves.

I don't know whether feeds usage was growing but it was not comparable to social media. At that time papers were increasingly adding paywalls and didn't show any signs of embracing feeds any further.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#105

Post by awiesenhofer » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

grayrest wrote: post #84

mosselman wrote: post #76

I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…

> When did RSS go out of style anyway? It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#106

Post by kungtotte » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

adrianmsmith wrote: post #90

IlPeach wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got a link?

I do the same. I use https://blogtrottr.com/ and am very happy wit it.

Are you paying for it or do you just put up with the ads? If so, how intrusive are they?

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#107

Post by singingfish » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#108

Post by kemenaran » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

svalorzen wrote: post #94

One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar). Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?

I would guess mainly for synchronization between different computers and devices?

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#109

Post by grzm » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

modernerd wrote: post #100

grzm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree RSS is pretty crufty. (I've got a soft spot for Atom.) Do you have a list of validators that don't accept HTTPS resources as valid?

Feed Validator is one. (It returns “href must be a valid URL” for image resources that start https:// because the RSS spec does not openly say that HTTPS image URLs are valid.) I tried and failed to change this, and was told that the RSS spec needed to change first: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/issues/16 And I'm not the only one: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/30 I respect Sam's opinion in thos…

Thanks for the links. Do you happen to know if the validator accepts Atom with https resources? I'd think it should (if I'm understanding correctly), given that it uses IRIs, and IRIs support https as a protocol.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#110

Post by pacoverdi » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 8:23 AM UTC

> THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers

This is from a page that connects to (excerpt):

   c.amazon-adsystem.com
   z-na.amazon-adsystem.com
   tag.bounceexchange.com
   graph.facebook.com
   sb.scorecardresearch.com
   cdn.mediavoice.com
   odb.outbrain.com
   cdn.quantummetric.com
   native.sharethrough.com
   s.skimresources.com
   pixel.tapad.com
   d.turn.com
   p.typekit.net
   use.typekit.net
   cdn.yldbt.com
   segment-data.zqtk.net