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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?

#391

Post by ghaff »

freehunter wrote: post #385
jhauris wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publisher…

The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places. I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially c…

I suspect that a lot of it's just historical happenstance. Podcasting as we think of it today started ~2003 and was very intertwined with the development of RSS. The click-wheel iPod (which was really the breakout model) wasn't until the next year. And the current era of podcasting didn't really take off until it became easy to sync with smartphones.

So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and didn't see podcasting as being a big deal--which they were sort of right about; arguably even today it's somewhat mainstream but I'd bet the majority of people in the US have never listened to a podcast and certainly don't listen regularly.

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

#392

Post by rainbowmverse »

pmlnr wrote: post #354
gglitch wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on this, please?

Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html This is completely hidden from the UI by now.

Alt->Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page

It could be more prominent.

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

#393

Post by xpil »

noam87 wrote: post #60

I'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.

Yep, been using NewsBlur since almost day 1 and never looked back. The two killer features for me are (1) mouseless operation and (2) the blurblog where I can send favourite stories then make them available via a single RSS feed.

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

#394

Post by NicoJuicy »

duiker101 wrote: post #364
NicoJuicy wrote: post #288

Not finished ( performance), but my personal bookmarking site ( like HN or Reddit) supports the auto-download of Feeds and implements Tags through it ( RSS based). http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest For now, it's usefull for me personally, but it seriously needs a update. It also supports url customizers ( eg. preventing paywalls from certain sites to redirect through the facebook share url)

Seems pretty dead. There's a timeout on the db.

Performance, it's probably syncing RSS feeds or too many people ( as mentioned, need to improve it).

Seems to work fine though when i'm watching it: http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest but a db timeout could be indeed.

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

#395

Post by forapurpose »

cyberpip wrote: post #30
forapurpose wrote: post #12

I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for. Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed i…

The major feature here would be deduplication, in my opinion. That would be hard to do though as it would have to parse the feed contents (which vary from links to articles to full blow articles sometimes) and use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe? Curious if there is a smarter solution to that feature possibility.

> use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe

That's the problem I intended to solve by 'grouping', as I called it: Don't delete the similar items, but group them together (see my GP comment regarding the functionality).

Also, it might not be as hard as it seems with this data. There would be maybe thousands of records (though you'd want it to scale higher); how many would have the same sets of proper nouns, for example, and not be about the same topic?

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

#396

Post by _asummers »

CAT0 wrote: post #171
afterburner wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.

They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/

There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.

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

#397

Post by Animats »

amerine wrote: post #369
Ajedi32 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major sites like YouTube. If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it via RSS.

I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore. Basically, there is gold out there.

Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.

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

#398

Post by freehunter »

ghaff wrote: post #391
freehunter wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places. I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially c…

I suspect that a lot of it's just historical happenstance. Podcasting as we think of it today started ~2003 and was very intertwined with the development of RSS. The click-wheel iPod (which was really the breakout model) wasn't until the next year. And the current era of podcasting didn't really take off until it became easy to sync with smartphones. So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and…

Yeah another thing I'm surprised at, being a relatively new podcaster, is how often I approach people/businesses to interview them and they tell me they either don't listen to podcasts or don't even know what they are.

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

#399

Post by PhasmaFelis »

sago wrote: post #124
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS is, fundamentally, just links to web pages. Why would it need to have built-in commenting? Just go to the linked page and comment there.

We don't need it to have comments. But I think the lack of commenting is the big problem of an RSS focused ecosystem. Shooting comments off into the ether is fine by clicking the page and commenting there. But, if you have a couple of dozen blogs in your RSS feed, and leave a handful of comments a day, clicking back through the specific place to see if you've been responded to is way too much effort. Sites like HN, R…

Any decent commenting system lets you receive reply notifications. If some of them don't, the solution is to fix that, not split the userbase by constructing an entirely new, parallel comment system.

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

#400

Post by bogomipz »

pbourke wrote: post #316
bogomipz wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS." Can you elaborate on this? How are they related?

Podcasts are audio files syndicated over RSS

I see, I did not know this, I guess I never bothered to look. Thanks.
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