I am another long-time RSS user.
For me, it is the only sane way to keep up with my scientific journal reading.
That it's also a fine way to read webcomics and tech blogs is a nice bonus.
Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
11–20 of 358 posts
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.
Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.
Bunch of webheads that thinks JS is the end all be all of languages...
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#13I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem).
By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed item. Repeat 1,000x.
Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I would guess.
'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example, after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read and discard the remainder en masse. I'd guess that it would reduce the feed items I need to process by well over 50%.
Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per second.
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#14Can part of the renaissance be switching to a JSON format? Please?
Yes, and while we are at it. Can we make HTML JSON based, as well? { "head" : [...], "body" : [ { "name" : "H1", "text" : "Hello JSON" }, ... ] } So much easier on the eye. ; )
Ditching HTML for CommonMark (like MarkDown but without any daring fireballs) would be better IMO. Then again, the designers of HTML had no idea what it would become when they carved out a subset of SGML for their document markup. If we were starting over perhaps a mix of XAML for app-stuff and CommonMark for text would be a good mix... unless that totally screws up i18n. "It is what we have and it seems to work" explains HTML somewhat adequately.
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#15I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it),…
I don't want to tell you what to do but wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to?
I subscribed to way too many feeds in the past and going through them with shortcuts / opening them in the background and then going through the opened pages to read them afterwards works well. It's even quite fast but as soon as you skip a day it just piles up until you can't work off the queue any more.
I then just decided to really look at which feeds I really get most out of and unsubscribed from most of them. Way happier with that strategy and I don't feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by the unread count.
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#16I'm always positively surprised how compatible the whole RSS ecosystem mostly is. They either implement the Google Reader API or the Fever API and you can choose between a lot of different apps for your platforms.
My current combination that I'm happy with for a few years is:
https://miniflux.net + Reeder on iOS and Mac
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#17I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it),…
At ContentGems.com we aspire to offer some of the features you're looking for. We fetch a ton of feeds each day, index them, and let you filter the items based on a powerful query api (Lucene). So in addition to reading your own feeds, you can also extract interesting content from other feeds and discover new feeds. It also deduplicates articles (on a sliding scale of similarity). We are in the process of building out the feed reader component (which is trivial compared to what we're already doing with search). An interesting twist on feed readers is that CG treats your Twitter home timeline like an RSS feed, indexing all shared articles and including them in the Firehose of feeds. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.
There's nothing "wrong" with XML but with JSON there's no need to add another 5 pounds (2.2 KG) of JavaScript to convert XML to JavaScript objects. For any other language it doesn't matter since you're re-mapping to objects, most likely, but with JavaScript eating the web (even on the server side) I think the question should be "why shouldn't this be JSON" as a default. In the end either way works. I would love to se…
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Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.
There's nothing "wrong" with XML but with JSON there's no need to add another 5 pounds (2.2 KG) of JavaScript to convert XML to JavaScript objects. For any other language it doesn't matter since you're re-mapping to objects, most likely, but with JavaScript eating the web (even on the server side) I think the question should be "why shouldn't this be JSON" as a default. In the end either way works. I would love to se…
> There's nothing "wrong" with XML but with JSON there's no need to add another 5 pounds (2.2 KG) of JavaScript to convert XML to JavaScript objects
Non web-dev guy here, but browsers have excellent XML parses out there that can turn XML into a document object with a fully fledged query language. Why does it need to be a JS object?
Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance
#20Is there anything that can turn your email into a secure personal RSS feed? A feed reader that also includes emails would replace quite a bit of what centralized social media provides.