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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

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Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#81

Post by firasd »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #59
originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for contro…

Embedded images?

I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google Reader) doesn't care to use feeds. Podcasts (based on feeds) are still held back by the idea that you have to figure out how to subscribe to a show.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#83

Post by padthai »

disconnected wrote: post #31

"People" keep rattling on about how RSS needs to be revived. Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where: - The guardian - BBC - Reuters - Ars Technica - LWN - Hacker News and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed? Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist? Because I sure as hell don't.

Here is the RSS feed of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Edit:

Every single of those webpages have an RSS feed.

Ars Technica: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index/

The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/rss

LWN: https://lwn.net/headlines/newrss

BBC: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/news_front_page...

Reuters: http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#84

Post by eric_the_read »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #59
originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for contro…

RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#85

Post by AznHisoka »

originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

.. and also how they force people to adopt it when it is convenient? ie Facebook making you privately specify RSS feeds for Instant Articles through their system (but not public ones that other people can use)

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#86

Post by anotherevan »

cbovis wrote: post #62
ravenstine wrote: post #20

Is 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.

I recently discovered Feedbin allows you to subscribe to email newsletters, which pretty much keeps you in RSS land for anything news related.

I believe you can do something similar with NewsBlur.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#87

Post by jwilk »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #55
whorleater wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging Didn't blogging start on wordpress/blogger/livejournal?

Movable Type preceded WordPress by a couple of years or so, FWIW.

But not the others:

1999 LiveJournal

1999 Blogger

2001 Movable Type

2003 WordPress

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#88

Post by kripy »

fny wrote: post #57
originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

Did Twitter[0] kill RSS or is that mode of expression not conducive for it? Evan Williams (Blogger Founder, RSS -> Twitter co-founder, No-RSS -> Medium founder, RSS[1]) has explored many of these modalities. He probably decided Twitter didn't need RSS. Maybe we're all learning about the health of certain forms of discourse? https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [0]: https://help.medium.com/h…

The original REST API had a quasi-RSS feed[0].

[0]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed...

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#89

Post by aetherspawn »

Would anyone be interested in an RSS social network that allows you to

1. Pull in RSS news streams

2. Automatically generate your own RSS streams from your posts (and re-shares)

3. Provides content curation over the RSS streams amongst your friends that are subscribed on the same streams

4. Presents previews with images and scraped data in a 3/4-column summary layout that is easy to skim

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#90

Post by WorldMaker »

xd1936 wrote: post #70
frouge wrote: post #65

How about implementing RSS in the browser? My ideal implementation would be to click on my special RSS bookmark folder and immediatly see how many new items there are for each site of the folder, something like "kottke.org (5)" <- special mention to a lovely blog

Firefox does pretty much exactly this. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

Firefox also has an okay/not-great reading experience if you directly navigate to an RSS page, including a configurable bar at the top with options to subscribe to the feed as live bookmarks, or in a feed reader of choice.

An interesting thing is IE had similar RSS support for rendering RSS feeds, configurable subscription options for them, and RSS feed-driven favorites folders. (Of course, none of that has made it into Edge. Yet?)

Perhaps more interesting was that IE had a platform API for its RSS store. It supported using the same Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that Windows Update and other systems use for background downloading things during "quiet" periods on the machine to update the feeds. That RSS store provided a lot of what you needed for a good RSS reader application, though few reader applications took advantage to my knowledge. (I recall having part of a hand-crafted one at one point.) Outlook used to use this RSS store for its RSS support (thus sharing its feeds with IE), and the shutdown of IE's RSS support may be part of why Outlook's RSS support hasn't really worked that well in the last several versions.

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