Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

neflabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 358 posts

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#111

Post by michaelbuckbee »

dfee wrote: post #33
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.

Nothing is free. WordPress is also a blogging platform first and foremost.

I think you're being downvoted as there is both wordpress.com (which you correctly state is a blogging platform) and then wordpress.org (the open source PHP application anyone can freely install on anything from shared hosting on up).

At even a cursory glance, independent Wordpress installs vastly outnumber the number of domains hosted on wordpress.com

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#112

Post by awat »

AznHisoka wrote: post #85
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)

I think you hit it head on with this. It seems to be a control thing first and foremost. The worst nightmare is that you will grab their content in a text only format with no ads.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#113

Post by beefsack »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #92
douglaswlance wrote: post #21

I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options. (Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!) http://feedly.com

When Google Reader died, I tried several alternatives including Feedly. At that time it could import your feeds, but it didn't do export. I don't now, but I didn't want to use a service that locked-in RSS feeds.

I'm in exactly the same boat, and ended up on Go Read, but recently I was looking for a solution which had better mobile support and came back to Feedly.

Created an account first and checked whether you can export your OPML, and indeed you can in the feed settings: https://i.imgur.com/ttPNrd1.png

The mobile app is great too, it has become my main RSS reading platform.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#114

Post by acdha »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #77
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.

Ars technica only provides a blurb trough rss and iirc no topic filtered rss, hardly a good or usable solution if one has to get out and find content outside the reader

Subscribers get full text and they offer per-section feeds.

Beyond that, a full-featured client can implement either of those features. I use Newsblur.com which allows you to control whether you see the feed's description or the readability-filtered page, and you have a training system to up/down flag authors, tags, and arbitrary text.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#115

Post by 8bitsrule »

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.

Not just them. After last week's discussion, I noticed this week that, while Rick Steves does podcasts, I had to hunt for the RSS feeds page hosted on his own website. WTF?

My usual policy for podcasts is, RSS subscription or else. Ain't got time to visit the damn website. Science Friday tried that for a while and soon went back.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#116

Post by dmix »

> No suspicious javascript.

My only problem with this is the very positive trend towards design-heavy journalism... just like the NYTimes Wind Turbine article currently on the homepage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/ener...

I love the Instapaper/RSS style consumption as much as anyone but that doesn't mean that multi-MB pages with plenty of JS/CSS/Images are always a bad thing.

Maybe the solution is to differentiate between our long-form high-quality content reading UX from the faster-paced blog/RSS style consumption?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#117

Post by Semiapies »

kripy wrote: post #88
fny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I certainly subscribed to Twitter RSS feeds until Twitter eliminated the feeds.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#118

Post by essayist »

smsm42 wrote: post #103
ASalazarMX wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google Reader died, I tried several alternatives including Feedly. At that time it could import your feeds, but it didn't do export. I don't now, but I didn't want to use a service that locked-in RSS feeds.

I think you can back up OPML to Dropbox, which should provide kind of export facility, since OPML is a generic format.

Feedly does OPML import/export now. It worked for me the other day.

I'm just a (non-paying) customer.

https://blog.feedly.com/opml/

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#120

Post by seriocomic »

jwilk wrote: post #87
tnorthcutt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

B2/Cafelog (from where Mike/Matt forked to WordPress) was also 2001.

I dumped MT (due to my Perl-aversion) for B2 and then onto the WordPress fork when B@ founder Valdrighi stopped active development of it.

Post reply on HN