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Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

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Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#61

Post by bArray »

jessriedel wrote: post #35
skrause wrote: post #21

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…

For reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a kindle book. Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all po…

>This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all posts the author would like to make public, regardless of how many are new to the reader. This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts. (The single RSS file on my blog takes up the majority of my bandwidth costs.)

Still, exceptionally low cost compared to running pretty much any website's massive CSS and JS files. A single image in most cases will take more than the entire RSS feed before compression.

That said, I would like to see a new standard (a new one would be needed [1]) that only gets the difference from what you last read - I think that would really take RSS feeds to new places of usefulness. There's no reason why you couldn't send the server an ID (not timestamp to avoid issues with timezones, clock stretching, forward/backward time setting, etc) of the last request and have it send back everything since (within reason).

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_rss.asp

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#62

Post by dsr_ »

dlbucci wrote: post #53

Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?

Basically interchangeable, to the point where it is extremely rare that a tool will work with one and not the other.

(Not the same code path, just that a tool to work with RSS will usually end up also supporting ATOM and vice-versa.)

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#63

Post by gkya »

jessriedel wrote: post #35
skrause wrote: post #21

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…

For reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a kindle book. Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all po…

For your RSS issue, you can safely truncate your RSS feed to the latest N articles, where N is a random reasonable number you choose (10 is good, because it's so decimal). RSS reader software will know how to deal with it.

WRT scraping, it is getting harder because funny websites w/ no static content where everything is generated via Angular or Perpendicular or sth. are really hard to deal with. Recently my uni switched from an army of Wordpress websites to an homegrown AJAX-MVC-Reactive abomination where the links are reimplemented via some funny black magic where the actual link items (which are not anchors btw) don't have encoded in them the link targets, but only an onclick event that knows somehow where to go. And because they just killed all the RSS feeds, I wrote up sth. to revive them for me via phantomjs, but could not figure how to find the link targets, I cannot link the RSS items to anywhere but the main announcements page, and I can't add any description from the link target.

RSS should be kept, those who don't know the job they are doing should be replaced.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#64

Post by rolandog »

onli wrote: post #47
eli wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few of those: http://www.feedsapi.com/ and http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

If I may add mine: https://www.pipes.digital/ . It allows creating feeds for sites if the site is structured enough, and the feed can then manipulated with other blocks, similar to how Yahoo Pipes worked.

I miss Yahoo Pipes so much! Thanks for creating this service, I'll try it out soon and leave some feedback here!

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#65

Post by gkya »

catach wrote: post #33
k1ns wrote: post #22

Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default. Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so: http://example.com/?feed=rss2

Related: Firefox still offers an RSS button that you can place in a toolbar. Lights up when a site has a feed available.

Also related: if your browser can not do this, view source, and look for a with rel=alternate.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#66

Post by russellbeattie »

I'm amazed RSS has lasted this long.

In terms of technology, it's a dog. Beyond the problems associated with malformed XML, and crazy namespaces (I once went through several hundred thousand feeds and found over 100 different tags), the process of polling for new content is inefficient and wasteful. I recently moved my personal blog from one server to another and was amazed at the amount of bot traffic I get - over 5 years after I stopped blogging regularly.

In terms of business sense - why would a publisher ever want to create an RSS feed in the first place? I'm still surprised they bother. RSS feeds don't drive sufficient traffic to justify their existence, and allows easy copying/republishing. There's zero financial incentive.

I'm a news junkie and loved blogs in their heyday, but those days are over and they aren't coming back.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#67

Post by gkya »

gizzlon wrote: post #8
jeena wrote: post #2

I like #ReviveRSS but: > Powered By: Stream, Algolia, MongoDB, SendGrid, AWS My feed reader is an old PHP script running on a NUC.

Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be _great_, but not necessary

Elfeed, if you are using Emacs. You can view most blogs and lighter websites w/ no problems with Emacs's web browser, EWW. Or you can tell Emacs w/ one variable to open links with an external browser.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#68

Post by dsr_ »

JelteF wrote: post #38
barakm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; it's impossible to self-host and is therefore a non-starter. For what it's worth, I've been pretty happy with FreshRSS ( https://freshrss.org/ )

All these services have free plans either if you have little traffic or if it's open source. So it's definitely possible to self host this (although maybe not completely trivial). Disclaimer: I work at Stream (but haven't really worked on Winds)

An outage at any one of five services will stop your thing from working, and it won't necessarily be obvious what happened. Now you need to monitor five services, plus the one you actually built. Oh, and the free plans will stop being free once you cross a threshold of use, which is probably about when it becomes important to you.

If each of those services has an outage once a year, you'll get to feel all of them.

Compare to tt-rss: if your own web server and database are running (and there's an internet connection), it's working.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#69

Post by stevewillows »

skrause wrote: post #21

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…

I use http://feed43.com for this. Its nice because you can create your own standard for the output.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#70

Post by unicornporn »

I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite.

TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] https://freshrss.org

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