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It's time to head back to RSS?

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

#111

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.

There are numerous alternatives to Reader, and a lot of people are using them.

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

#112
post #82

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…

Medium has had RSS for quite a while, it just didn't link them in a page's metadata. I believe they do now. For example: https://medium.com/feed/flockademic (publication) https://medium.com/feed/@flockademic (user) The latter also includes responses to stories though, which can be noisy.

Oh wow thanks I didn’t realize there was a comment free version, that’s very handy. I worry though if rss is a secret feature that will get the axe someday since I was never able to find any reference to rss on the sites themselves and only came across the noisy @ version by chance from some other random comment on the internet someplace.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t pay for it. They’re not intrusive at all. Actually I’d forgotten there were ads until you mentioned it :)

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

#114

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.

Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

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

#115
I’ve pretty settled on using Feedly and Reeder in iOS, even though I experimented with RSS via IMAP[1] for a fairly long time.

I zip through 1000+ news items a day over breakfast in this way, and my only real gripes are duplicated postings (which are usually best solved by careful handpicking of news sources) and the lack of a decent backlog/archival feature (I settled on Pocket for that).

On and off, I try to build my own “most relevant/trending/hot items” feed via NLTK, but topics of interest vary too quickly in out industry for proper training...

[1]: https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap

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

#116
post #25

If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1], feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP, since that gives better control than sending…

Thunderbird already supports feeds.

And for anyone who still thinks that the T-bird project died long ago, look again ... it's been greatly improved for the past few years and an interface overhaul is in the works.

I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few make you use a search-engine to find out where).

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

#117
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it seems to validate Atom feeds with HTTPS image sources: http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftant...

Apple no longer supports Atom for podcasts, though, so unfortunately we couldn't use it as an alternative. (Podcast feeds must now be RSS 2.0: https://help.apple.com/itc/podcasts_connect/#/itc1723472cb )

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

#119

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.

Google Reader wasn't just an RSS client, it was social. you could subscribe to your friends feeds, see what they were interested in etc.

Google Reader was a social network around RSS

(I also think there was in platform commenting too?)

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

#120
post #114

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.

Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email, being federated as well, is easy for anyone to grok.
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