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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

#111
post #84
post #54

Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for packaging their Linux app.

Why it is sad?

Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the developer controls the update process, not the user.

Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise.

See: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...

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

#112
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.

and the question persists; how can this insight earn me profit?

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

#113
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. But people who don't use the right aggregators will not be able to read past 10 posts. And if everyone was using aggregators, I wouldn't have such a high bandwidth bill. > WRT scraping, it is get…

> But people who don't use the right aggregators will not be able to read past 10 posts.

I do not think such aggregators exist, and you can just ignore people using software that do not comply to widespread conventions.

> And if everyone was using aggregators, I wouldn't have such a high bandwidth bill.

I don't understand this sentence. All RSS client software is called aggregator.

> But sites that can have an RSS feed necessarily need to deliver their content in a static form.

Not really. Many websites which are essentially blogs are transforming themselves into single-page web apps. My uni's websites included. Some do it for the $$$, some for reasons that I can not know (jumping the bandwagons with minds toggled off).

You can just set your blog software to truncate your feeds to a reasonable number w/o any worries. And I suggest you look at your logs, because some silly bots might be consuming your bandwith along with your normal traffic; there are some that like RSS feeds.

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

#114
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Take a nice little joke please, downvoters, will ya?

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

#115
post #76

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…

Since Google Reader retired, I've moved to www.netvibes.com

I forgot all about Netvibes.com! I remember setting up a personal dashboard with my emails, news, Digg, etc way back in ~2006. It may very well have been my first foray into RSS, now that I think about it...

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

#116
post #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.

That's awesome, I'll start making a little list of tools that help you do more with RSS

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

#117
post #51

I'm still angry (ish) at google for killing google reader, it met my RSS needs really nicely. I use feedly now. Which is pretty good. For me having it has a web site is most useful, rather than a device oriented thing that manages feeds.

The thing that bugs me about the Feedly website is that it doesn't really feel like a RSS reader, at least on the free service. Maybe the paid version is (much) more customizable but I doubt it. It reminds me more of Flipboard.

Edit: It's tailored to marketing people so I think that's why.

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

#119
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…

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