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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#211

Post by cannonedhamster »

kmfrk wrote: post #195

I don't know if this is as much of a comeback for RSS as a comeback for self-hosted services. I needed RSS enough to self-host Fever (on A Small Orange which is a POS that I need to migrate from, if anyone can recommend me a simple and user-friendly alternative). Similarly, I've been waiting for Pinry to release version 2, but this seems to have eluded the team for a few years unfortunately. It physically hurts when…

Personally I've really enjoy The Old Reader for my RSS feeds. Not really a fan of the social aspects of it and it's not self hosted, which if it's a requirement for you this doesn't fill.

I've used SelfOSS which was fine, but didn't like some of the feeds I tried to import. It's pretty lightweight though and based on your like of Fever this seems like it might be a little too light.

I'm sure I'm going over stuff you've head of with Tiny Tiny RSS, so I won't go into that too much.

A really small shared hosting reseller with decent support I've used for years is Hole In The Wall Hosting. It isn't a big operation but it just works and does what you need it to do, SSH is extra but the plans are relatively inexpensive.

Re: RSS is undead

#212

Post by xtracto »

organsnyder wrote: post #180
stryk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something tha…

When Reader was killed, I switched to Feedly and haven't looked back. It took Reader's feature-set (at least, the features I care about) and has continued to provide a robust application for consuming news. I never used the social bits of Reader, though.

I second that. I am an avid Feedly user and a paying customer. It really filled up the huge void in Google Reader. I use Feedly it to consume RSS feeds.

Although nowadays they hide the feature in the interface, it is possible to subscribe to a feed by just pasting it in input text box when you are looking for new content.

Re: RSS is undead

#213

Post by xtracto »

digi_owl wrote: post #202
naravara wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would they kill that off?! It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz. First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way. They probably e…

Ah yes, G+, that resulted in the + being removed from the search field. All thanks to an ex-MS "cookie licker" (the term was used by Google people after he left the company).

So, you are telling me that a person arrive to Google, broke the internet (by replacing the well behaved + with the annoying "") and then left to leave things worse than they were? Sad state of affairs...

Re: RSS is undead

#214

Post by armandososa »

pjmlp wrote: post #194
jeremyjh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

I never understood why use a browser for doing something that should naturally be done in a native app. Shutting down Reader had zero effect on my RSS reading habits.

Oh no, no, no, no. You're reading web things, you need it inside a browser. You middle click a link and it opens inside a new tab, just like that. Native clients and their embedded web views never work the way you expect them to be, and ugh, there's a link to something inside facebook and I'm not logged in... should I go back and right click -> "Open in browser", nah, forget it.

That's why I'm happy to rediscover the old reader. It is not only not a native app, it doesn't try to act like one.

Re: RSS is undead

#215

Post by arthurfm »

ryangittins wrote: post #135
sametmax wrote: post #113

Most of the problems the author mentions are, to me, the actual reasons I love RSS. No filtering. No comments. No proposal. No central way to find them. It's not the absence of curation. It's my curation. It's easy: I like a site, I want news, I get the RSS. I delete it when it's not to my taste anymore. The basic, deterministic, manual aspect of it is what's right with it. Not what's wrong. Another weird idea is tha…

> No filtering. Shameless(-ish) plug for my project, siftrss: https://siftrss.com/ You add a source feed, include/exclude items by keyword or regex match, and get a new filtered feed to subscribe to. Because it produces a normal RSS feed like any other, it works with all RSS readers. It's totally free. No ads, no account, no email capture, nothing but totally disposable RSS feed filters.

Does siftrss do anything like Full-Text RSS [1] to transform partial web feeds into full feeds? Quite a few of the websites I subscribe to only show summaries of the articles.

[1] http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Re: RSS is undead

#216

Post by armandososa »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #210
stryk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something tha…

why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? Somebody did, The Old Reader (theoldreader.com natch) was setup to be as close to Google Reader as possible. I've been a paying user since it launched shortly after the Google Reader shut down, very happy with the service.

I tried The Old Reader as soon as it came up, but it was in an uncanny valley were it was not quite as good as Google's –or maybe I was just sad and feeling unappreciative– but recently I rediscovered it and became a paying user within the hour. I just wish I have saved my 500+ subscriptions OPML somewhere.

Re: RSS is undead

#217

Post by ad-hominem »

organsnyder wrote: post #180
stryk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something tha…

When Reader was killed, I switched to Feedly and haven't looked back. It took Reader's feature-set (at least, the features I care about) and has continued to provide a robust application for consuming news. I never used the social bits of Reader, though.

I try to use Feedly every six months but the UI is so unusably bad that I abandon it completely after two tries to read my feeds.

I have quit reading about a dozen news sites / webcomics just because I used to check them through the feeds and now I can't be bothered.

Re: RSS is undead

#218

Post by discreditable »

mAEStro-paNDa wrote: post #112
discreditable wrote: post #98

> losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to kill enterprise value Dropping the garbage styles is one of my favorite things about RSS. Using my TT-RSS via phone app is a lot speedier than the "enterprise value" provided by the native site. This article loads 3.97MB with an adblocker. In TT-RSS, I can load the homepage and a full-page RSS article from Ars Technica for only 600kb.

Exactly. In fact, this is a tremendous advantage that RSS has. The assertion that it needs some "sort of commerce layer" is not an issue of the technology, but a question of the industry of advertising and the structure of the economy. The problem of keywords as the author mentions is a cultural one, based on the way our society exchanges and prioritizes the information we receive.

I think the author's wording is perfect. It's not "user value" they're concerned about, it's "enterprise value".

Re: RSS is undead

#219

Post by armandososa »

digi_owl wrote: post #202
naravara wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why would they kill that off?! It happened back when "Social" was a big thing and Google was trying to push everyone onto its erstwhile Facebook competitor Google+ and it's erstwhile Twitter competitor Google Buzz. First they killed the social feed and made the button auto-post to your Google Buzz account, but Buzz being a version of Twitter, had a lot more noise to signal so nobody used it that way. They probably e…

Ah yes, G+, that resulted in the + being removed from the search field. All thanks to an ex-MS "cookie licker" (the term was used by Google people after he left the company).

dude! we want names

Re: RSS is undead

#220

Post by jeffreyrogers »

You don't use RSS to follow news sites. You use RSS to follow infrequently updated sites so you don't have to keep checking them to see if there's any new content. It still works for this purpose and most sites that fit this format still have RSS or Atom feeds.
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