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It's time to head back to RSS?

wired.com

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

#131

Post by thinkloop »

gboudrias wrote: post #102
lovelearning wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I use RSS as todo lists and that still works wonders

How as todo lists?

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

#132

Post by wyclif »

tgraham wrote: post #98
grayrest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feedly is fantastic. Coupled with Reeder on iOS it more than replaces.

I'm curious about your comment. Why don't you use Feedly by itself? Why/how do you combine Feedly with Reeder?

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

#133

Post by yxhuvud »

singingfish wrote: post #107

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.

It is the same in the media industry, RSS is everywhere. It is just that the end users seldom see it..

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

thinkloop wrote: post #120
Zhyl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by princekolt »

thinkloop wrote: post #120
Zhyl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either.

A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time.

Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.

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

#136

Post by wybiral »

I've been aggregating my news for my own use recently so I can keep a database of articles and grab articles from more sources than just RSS (some are parsed out of HTML).

The Python code for some of the sources is here: https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources

On my network there's a bunch of those stream sources feeding into a Golang server that stores the articles and aggregates the ones I'm interested in for real-time updates/alerts.

The nice thing is that I can attach temporary scrapers with alerts to monitor status pages and other updates that don't use RSS or anything.

IMO WebSocket API's or streaming HTTP make more sense than RSS these days. But RSS can easily be converted into a format like that if you store the recent history and only push new content.

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

#137

Post by djhworld »

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…

This is my biggest gripe with RSS. Not the fault of the protocol, just the user experience.

I mostly consume my feeds on the London Underground, so offline reading is perfect for that, but I tend to have to scroll through articles that are truncated because there's no point in reading them.

You could argue that the infrastructure of the tube network is the problem, not the state of the modern web, but still, it sucks.

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

#138

Post by nicky0 »

thinkloop wrote: post #120
Zhyl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Open solutions are always more confusing than centralised ones. End user podcast apps try to hide all the details an make it look like "here's an app with podcasts in it". But behind the scenes it is wonderfully messy. Same with email.

Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.

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

#140

Post by __bee »

wybiral wrote: post #136

I've been aggregating my news for my own use recently so I can keep a database of articles and grab articles from more sources than just RSS (some are parsed out of HTML). The Python code for some of the sources is here: https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources On my network there's a bunch of those stream sources feeding into a Golang server that stores the articles and aggregates the ones I'm interested in for rea…

Generally speaking, is it legal storing RSS content (if the RSS contains the article)
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