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It's time to head back to RSS?
271–280 of 503 posts
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”,…
Email is still pretty simple. It’s the stuff around email that has appeared for source validating and spam prevention that has complicated it...and really that’s not any one persons fault. Just people trying to solve a hard problem.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC seem to be making a real dent here though. DKIM is the most complicated to implement and manage since ideally you want to periodically rotate the keys and it has to be implemented at the sending server level instead of the DNS.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?
Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising. > The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant? That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that wa…
I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link independent of itunes/whatever.
I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#274I support this, but I think that RSS services for publishers need to be a part of this conversation, too. I wrote a piece a while back about how FeedBurner has basically been allowed to survive in zombie form at Google—with literally no improvements since at least 2011.
https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-history/
There are alternatives to FeedBurner that are quite good (I personally use FeedPress) but I think that if RSS is going to get any momentum back, we need more people making these tools again. The emergence of JSON as an alternative to RSS is a real opportunity here.
(Side note: Was a long-term Digg Reader user, so its loss was felt. I found FeedBin a decent alternative for my needs, FWIW.)
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#275I use my own RSS reader since around 8 years now. It has evolved quite a lot. Before I was using aKregator. I started with a simple CherryPy project and a SQLite database. It is now using Flask, SQLAlchemy and React: https://www.newspipe.org/ I have something like 200000 articles in the database. And the oldest article is from February 1995!
Just a heads-up: Tried logging in before I got the confirmation e-mail, typo in error message: > User is desactivated Should probably be something like > User account has not been activated yet. Check your e-mail, etc. etc.
Thanks, fixed. I used "Account not active", because an account can be deactivated later.
Maybe it will be even better to just say something like 'bad login and/or password'. In order to give the minimum of information.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#276If you miss the clean UI and keyboard shortcuts of Google Reader, I highly recommend BazQux Reader. The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2] [1] http://bazqux.com [2] https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb
BazQux coupled with FeedMe on Android is fantastic!
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#277If 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.
I used to do that, but you're tied to Thunderbird that way and I don't recall it having syncing for RSS, either. With a cron job, you're free to use whatever clients you want across multiple devices, with free sync thanks to IMAP.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#278I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off. I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way they're sold makes me gag.
I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything is marked as read, it's so patronising.
Now I use rrss (https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss) because it just reads feeds and doesn't constantly promote itself with management garbage.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#279I never left.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#280I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur ( https://newsblur.com/ ) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back. p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.
After dropping off of Facebook and trying to cleanse myself of a Reddit addiction, I went to Newsblur for my daily news. It's been really great.