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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

#181
Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what it became has everything to do with money.

Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy.

Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance of coming back unless it makes sense economically. And I don't see any of that mentioned in this article, nor am I aware of one that's guaranteed to work as good as ad driven model.

You might as well say it's a perfect time for the renaissance of steam engines.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#182

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.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux.

Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008.

I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc.

I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use my lap top, not just configure it every time systemd breaks something and I have to switch distros or window managers to get away from it.

I still like Linux on the server but in my opinion quality ux requires someone to get paid to do the un glamorous work like fixing compatibility issues and corner cases.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Syndicate (https://redalemeden.com/syndicate/) works similarly well for Safari.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well you can get a VPS for $2.50/mo these days with half a gig of ram, more than enough to handle 5-15 simultaneous visitors on your average WordPress blog. The WordPress software IS free. The WordPress.com service is not, as you pay for it by attaching their domain name to yours thereby providing them free advertising. Also, there's nothing to stop you from hosting your personal blog on your personal internet connec…

How do you solve around a non static ip?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Mozilla should make that more prominent so that users who don't know what RSS/ATOM is could "subscribe to this website" with just a click.

That was funny. Mozilla used to make that more prominent. Most users didn't care, because they still didn't know what that weird icon meant . That was ultimately the downfall of RSS - the web tech scene never managed to communicate to the average user what RSS was good for, what it did, and how to use it. The issue isn't "not knowing about RSS/ATOM". You don't need to. The same way e.g. you don't need to know what th…

It wasn't done the right way in the past. Sometimes an implementation is 80% right and you just need to do a few things to get to 100%.

It needs a better name than RSS/Atom. It should sound like English: "Subscribe to this website with ." (same icon)

"Really Simple Syndication" and acronyms cause non-technical people to shut down. It's a foreign language. (Edit: "Atom" would be a good name, because it's plain English, and probably a better format too.)

RSS/Atom didn't decline because of Mozilla -- it declined when Google killed Google reader.

The information overload could be solved with machine learning algorithms (run locally in the client) that sort posts into a "featured" folder.

There are solutions to all of the current issues with RSS/Atom.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#186

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.

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe. So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste. This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email. Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have bee…

Haven't you just described a blog though?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#187
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008. I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc. I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use…

When was the last time you bought a ThinkPad? This is my third one and suspend works. The Trackpad is great, with three buttons. 24 Gb of RAM, 11+ hour battery life in Linux, and a 4-year at-home next-day repair plan. It was $1,900 including tax, shipping, and support. Macs are much more expensive for worse specs.

This computer "just worked" out of the box, and there is full freedom to tinker with the system. I think the industry should get away from the idea that everything needs to work out of the box anyway.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe. So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste. This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email. Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have bee…

Haven't you just described a blog though?

Sounds more like a newsletter to me. Let people subscribe to the newsletter, send out an email blast once a day/week/month.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#189
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008. I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc. I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use…

When was the last time you bought a ThinkPad? This is my third one and suspend works. The Trackpad is great, with three buttons. 24 Gb of RAM, 11+ hour battery life in Linux, and a 4-year at-home next-day repair plan. It was $1,900 including tax, shipping, and support. Macs are much more expensive for worse specs. This computer "just worked" out of the box, and there is full freedom to tinker with the system. I think…

Im actually going to make the order for a new thinkpad today, to run NixOs on.

What specs and model do you have? Are there any tips, or something you wish you knew? My config reaches >€2500 quite fast.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#190
post #16

I'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

Curious, did you upgrade to 2.0? I went to check in on my site recently, and found that they nuked the project and rewrote it in Go.
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