71–80 of 303 posts
Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it from whatever computer I might be using.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, excep…
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
RSS's challenge has never been apps, it's support from publishers to keep using open formats.
Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds. Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their information from more centralized sources (like HN).
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sortof, if you are reading via a web based reader, the service itself only reads the feed once, and the users view the cached version.
You mean the fact that aggregators like The Old Reader just download the RSS file from the website periodically, and then serve up cached copies to their many user? True, although this is another way of saying that some of the value added by aggregators only exists by virtue of the terrible design of RSS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A site should still be able to choose to not produce RSS if they don't want. Encouraging RSS is different than forcing RSS feeds on sites that don't want them.
Site creators have the freedom to produce what they want, and users likewise have the freedom to consume how they want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Site creators have the freedom to produce what they want, and users likewise have the freedom to consume how they want.
Do they? I'm fairly certain they don't. Otherwise everyone would just be torrenting and stripping commercials.
(DMCA doesn't count, it's about circumventing things that prevent you from copying, not change your consumption.)