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Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

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101–110 of 303 posts

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

#101
post #13

To "revive" RSS, wider support from content providers is needed, not from software to consume feeds. Can't display a feed that doesn't exist!

We did our part. As of a couple weeks ago, you can now syndicate your published email conversations as an RSS feed:

https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex391...

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

#102
The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought. (I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on small and skewed sampling biases.)

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

#103
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…

They only show a snippet because they can't sell your eyeballs via the RSS feed. They need just need to drsw you to click onto their full site to blast you with ads.

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

#104

It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to share content. Just the opposite in fact.

I've never used an RSS reader so correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS can basically allow you to read the content without advertising? Sharing is fine, but I think they would prefer sharing in a way that can make money.

I use RSS/Atom to keep up-to-date on the 100+ webcomics I read, and the content in those feeds can vary wildly. Some include the full comic page, some only a thumbnail, some contain an accompanying blog post, others are empty and you need to follow the link to see the post.

If you want to read everything in your feed reader, those "incomplete" feeds are disappointing, but I just use it as a kind of newsletter to get notified of updates. I even use Thunderbird's built-in feed support.

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

#105
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?

At this point Atom is basically just the technical name for protocol that powers RSS.

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

#106
For websites I want to follow that don't provide an RSS feed I wrote a 30 line python script which runs in daily cronjob and creates me an an XML feed that I can import locally in my reader (newsboat). Easy and it works great.

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

#107

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 think many sites removed RSS, but many new sites and services in the last ~5 years, never implemented or served it in the first place. The typical share icons now are FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Email is less common (although usually there's an email newsletter signup). For a while, there wouldn't be link to RSS on the page, but you could still find the .rss or .atom link in the HTML header. But a lot of time…

Youtube is like this. They don't advertise rss feeds but include them in the page source of youtube channels. In the one or two times I couldn't find the link in the source, I'd just copy the channel id of the channel and use the feed url from another channel. Works like a charm!

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

#108
post #102

The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought. (I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on small and skewed sampling biases.)

the tide of sentiment rises and falls. the glow of opinion waxes and wanes. the wave of reaction ebbs and flows.

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

#110
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…

* Shameless plug *: Our little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com, helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, via an online feed builder and REST API.

Custom feeds can even be created for dynamic content, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering, and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.

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