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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

#91

Post by jessriedel »

bArray wrote: post #61
jessriedel wrote: post #35

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…

> Still, exceptionally low cost compared to running pretty much any website's massive CSS and JS files.

My blog has both RSS and browser readers, but the bandwidth is dominated by the RSS feed. Since the RSS file has no images (just HTML pointing to the images), I think it's more likely that for my Wordpress blog the CSS/JS overhead is just not that much (as opposed to the alternative hypothesis that I have many many times more RSS readers who never end up downloading the images).

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

#92

Post by zbentley »

entropie wrote: post #44
dang wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment broke the HN guidelines, so it was properly downvoted. This one too. Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all? We're hoping for something a bit better here.

Well yeah, ofcourse. I dont see where my inital post broke anything. It was esentially as meaningfull as OPs reply. Ofcourse, the point of "this app should run in a browser" is very valid. The reply, he can just code it himself is in my eyes a passive aggressive way of saying "no, i said your point is valid, but actually think it isn't and therefore ill ignore it anyway." Its obvioulsy, that a well developed web app…

"Your app should run on windows. It only runs on [not windows]? Downvote!"

"Your app runs based on technologies that mean you could easily port it to windows. But it doesn't run on windows? Downvote!"

"Your app runs on windows, but it's built on technologies that allow it to run anywhere else; why does it only run on windows? Downvote!"

See the pattern? Saying "I don't like your entire contribution because it doesn't run on a given platform on which I think it COULD run" is counterproductive and at best pointless; at worst rude.

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

#93

Post by ChristianBundy »

gkya wrote: post #63
jessriedel wrote: post #35

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…

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 switc…

> ... where N is an arbitrary number you choose (12 is good, because https://dozenal.org).

FTFY ;)

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

#94

Post by fenwick67 »

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?

Most rss readers work with Atom too, but more people know what RSS is than "atom", which is also text editor and a processor and a particle

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

#95

Post by tschellenbach »

unicornporn wrote: post #70

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…

The TwitRSS thing sounds awesome. It would be pretty easy to setup a web hosted version of Winds so people can access it however they want. Anything you particularly like about FreshRSS?

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

#97

Post by tschellenbach »

allanbreyes wrote: post #82
unicornporn wrote: post #70

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…

100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome. Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional. [1] https://miniflux.net/

Fun fact, Stream is almost entirely written in Go. Winds is based on Node/React. I think it's nice as it enables more people to contribute. (everyone knows JS)

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

#98

Post by prepend »

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 insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts.”

Since rss is text only the sizes are very small and compress well. Considering the average web page is 3M[0], pulling down 10-100k of every post ever doesn’t matter. And http takes care of not pulling the same file over and over.

It’s certainly a downside, but completely useable as is, and better than any viable alternative.

As far as standards go, I prefer simple, static file, over something requiring dynamic response.

There’s also nothing stopping the site from limiting the RSS feed to only 5 posts with a link for full.

[0] https://speedcurve.com/blog/web-performance-page-bloat/

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

#99

Post by prepend »

jessriedel wrote: post #91
bArray wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Still, exceptionally low cost compared to running pretty much any website's massive CSS and JS files. My blog has both RSS and browser readers, but the bandwidth is dominated by the RSS feed. Since the RSS file has no images (just HTML pointing to the images), I think it's more likely that for my Wordpress blog the CSS/JS overhead is just not that much (as opposed to the alternative hypothesis that I have many many…

Or you have way more users via rss than through their browser. This could be a good thing as it results in less bandwidth than if they all hit you directly through browser.
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