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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

neflabs.com

141–150 of 358 posts

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#141

Totally agreed with the article. I was talking to a friend who uninstalled facebook/instagram and she thought the idea of RSS was cool having burned out on constantly refreshing for new items. As a happy https://theoldreader.com/ user, I can't recommend it enough. It is just basic reliable RSS, subscribe and you'll see new items from them, no intelligent feed recommendations. It has a few light social features which…

I have been using it since Google Reader died in... I forgot when

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#142

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.

Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture.

Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds.

Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc.

Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux.

Etc.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#143
post #121
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a frequent RSS user, I don't mind when feeds use links back to the main site. I personally use RSS to notify me when a new article is posted.

As a frequent RSS user, I want to read the content in my preferred environment with my preferred contrast, colors and font. Many years ago I decided to not follow people who only put a crippeled version of their content into my RSS reader. If they don't want to be read, that's ok, they're pleanty others with better content anyway which I gladly read instead.

Any chance you know of a good list of full uncrippled rss feeds?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#145
post #38

If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the site requires that people reguarly…

Yeah, we need a new way of monetizing content on the Internet.

I wonder how much I'd pay for a full content rss feed from a good blog... Maybe 20cents/mo.? I know, cheap, but there is lots of content...

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#146

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.

Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.

Google’s Reader fiasco did more to kill RSS than any other actor in the community before or since. Cornering the market damaging their AdWords business with a free product subsidized by that very business and then shutting it down was really gross.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#147
post #28

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

My use of RSS has fallen (very recently) so I only consume a few feeds every day. However, I both enjoy and dislike Feedly. Here’s the rundown: Pros) - advanced features like highlighting, team management - pure free offering that just works - integration with pretty much every feed reader app out there Cons: - no ability/willingness to pull full text - iOS app is honestly kind of clunky I emailed them that I’d willi…

How well do these handle mathjax and the like?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#148
Coincidentally, I just switched to consuming news mostly through RSS. There just wasn't any better news aggregator that let me focus on news I actually cared about, and filtered out the crap I don't.

What I long for is something like Google Newsstand, with the power to scrape the whole web for my interests- except Google Newsstand incessantly shows me all the inane "hot", "trending", "popular" etc mainstream stuff no matter how many hundreds of times I mark, "show me less like this".

Using RSS is a little limiting because there's so little discovery for related subjects from new sources- but I can completely turn off the firehose of pop news.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture. Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds. Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc. Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Etc.

> You have to view source to find the URLs.

In Firefox, do Right Click->View Page Info. The "Feeds" tabs lists the links.

There are also extensions (e.g. "Awesome RSS") that will put a symbol in your URL bar.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#150
Infuriatingly, this site is using vw units to set font-size; not only does this make the body copy text almost unreadably large on my HiDPI display (~330 PPI), but it means the text then refuses to scale when the page is zoomed out in the browser. Low quality.
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