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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

#181

Post by jessriedel »

_pfxa wrote: post #113
jessriedel wrote: post #86

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. 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 fe…

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

I'm trying to distinguish between (1) people using software the directly downloads the RSS feed from my website to their device and (2) people who use services that download the RSS feed to a server which can then serve a cached copy of the posts to many users. If everyone used (2), then I would only have my RSS file downloaded as many times as there are separate services, which is not very many. So apparently many people are doing (1), and if my feed is short then they are limited in the blog history they can read to how long they've personally been subscribed (or less, if they need to clear their device and can't re-download my old posts).

> Not really. Many websites which are essentially blogs are transforming themselves into single-page web apps

That's why I specified "But sites that can have an RSS feed...". If you have an RSS feed with useful posts in the feed, then you must be delivering static pages. (If you're just delivering snippets with links to a dynamic page, then there is no way for any service to cache the page either.) So my question is: why isn't there software to scrape webpages of blogs that offer an RSS feed with complete posts? This would enable me to comveneiently read post history going back more than 10 posts.

> 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.

All the bots put together make up 27% of my bandwidth. It's a lot, but it's not the root cause.

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

#182

Post by catdog »

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…

> 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.

Counterpoint: I never had any issues with it and updates are just git pull, maybe login with the admin account for db migration, restart the update daemon, no issues at all.

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

#183

Post by jessriedel »

prepend wrote: post #99
jessriedel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My parenthetical comment raised this hypothesis and rejected it with a reason. So you should address that reason if you want to disagree.

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

#184

Post by jessriedel »

jerf wrote: post #134
jessriedel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need code. Just a static text file with a list of publication dates and URLs, each of which points to static HTML file for each publicly available posts. Then each user could check the list and download only what's new, without needing an aggregator. Users would never need to download the same content twice.

You can pretty much do that with RSS, if you want. Slightly decorated with some XML stuff but that'll pretty much gzip right away. Statically, if you use the right web servers and magic invocations the web server may specify. You'll find your feed readers aren't particularly impressed, though.

This won't work because my users don't have software to automatically download the new posts, curate them, and save them for offline reading (in contrast to having the posts directly in the RSS file, for which all that does happen). That would require...a new standard, i.e., a replacement for RSS.

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

#185

Post by lylo »

For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

For iOS I use Reeder (https://reederapp.com) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit (https://readkitapp.com/).

Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one now and again that doesn’t, but that’s their loss as far as I’m concerned.

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

#186

Post by progval »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #93
gkya wrote: 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 ;)

> because http://dozenal.org

FTFY

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

#187

Post by Jaruzel »

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.

Chrome also has an official extension (by Google) to do the same:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-e...

It can be configured to send the selected feed URL to your (online) aggregator of choice.

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

#188

Post by begriffs »

Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat https://newsboat.org/ to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way.

I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid.

Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.

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

#189

Post by m-localhost »

rolandog wrote: post #64
onli wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

One of the few Yahoo products that were great. I think Yahoo was pretty good in providing developer tools and apis.

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

#190

Post by m-localhost »

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…

Here is another feed creator service, for websites that don't offer a newsfeed: http://createfeed.wprssaggregator.com/
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