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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

#221

Post by cornholio »

dsr_ wrote: post #68
JelteF wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these services have free plans either if you have little traffic or if it's open source. So it's definitely possible to self host this (although maybe not completely trivial). Disclaimer: I work at Stream (but haven't really worked on Winds)

An outage at any one of five services will stop your thing from working, and it won't necessarily be obvious what happened. Now you need to monitor five services, plus the one you actually built. Oh, and the free plans will stop being free once you cross a threshold of use, which is probably about when it becomes important to you. If each of those services has an outage once a year, you'll get to feel all of them. Co…

Those are enterprise services that offer at least four nines of availability each, probably more. AWS even advertises 11 nines for a select set of features. They should add up to a service that has an availability in the 99.98%.

Meanwhile, obtaining anything over 99.9% is usually a challenge for the amateur. Even if you are on call on every day of the year, it's very easy to go to sleep with your phone muted and wake up the next morning to discover the service is down for whatever reason.

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

#222

Post by bArray »

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…

>the bandwidth is dominated by the RSS feed

Exceptionally low cost per hit, as opposed to overall bandwidth. Overall bandwidth will probably fair off worse as you say due to the polling nature of RSS. I think in general RSS readers could do a better job of fetching heads and checking whether or not there is a change worth fetching, that would save a tonne of bandwidth.

Also in general, I would be tempted to make an RSS feed more minimalist in terms of content and markup. It should just be a short `` and a link to the main article (which would still allow you to potentially monetize your content or gauge interest more accurately).

>I think it's more likely that for my Wordpress blog the CSS/JS overhead is just not that much

Also, bandwidth is just one resource - potentially each call to a page is a database read, whereas your RSS feed should be static (not sure about the WordPress implementation, but I would hope for static caching with something that doesn't change for long periods of time). I've seen WordPress database lockups with modest amounts of traffic (again, most of the time this could have been easily statically cached - but doesn't appear to be by default).

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

#223

Post by cerberusss »

Groxx wrote: post #168
jxcl wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not forced to use the App Store Is this true if you're a developer? I've stayed away from macs because you need xcode to get any sort of dev tools and xcode is only available on the App store (at least this was the case the last time I tried to develop on a mac).

XCode is through the app store AFAIK, but CLI tools are available without it, and have been so for at least a couple years now. Also there are a few other IDEs that do their own thing, it's objective-c and that's a language with multiple implementations (though one overwhelmingly popular one, obv). E.g. AppCode has been around for a while: https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

Xcode doesn't need to come from the App Store, it can also be downloaded from the Apple website: https://developer.apple.com/download/more/

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

#224

Post by thirdsun »

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…

> Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter.

I use https://feedbin.com as a RSS backend to any client I can imagine (Reeder on iOS in my case). Feedbin recently introduced a feature that treats and presents twitter searches/users/tags as RSS feed and extracts media and links in tweets. Right along all your other RSS feeds: https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-...

I think it's a brilliant addition to the service.

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

#225

Post by _pfxa »

jessriedel wrote: post #181
_pfxa wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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).

RSS is a means for people to follow new posts from you, in order to read new posts they are supposed to come to your blog and use your archives.

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

#226

Post by oblio »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #214
oblio wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Apache installed by default on Windows and MacOS? I find that very hard to believe :) Also, regular users tinkering with httpd.conf? Really?

It is on MacOS. And read my comment again - I agree that expecting users to tinker with httpd.conf is ridiculous.

Hey, I couldn't tell, maybe you enjoy self-flagellation. Maybe you tinker with sendmail.cf and .fvwmrc for fun :p

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

#227

Post by gkya »

mtremsal wrote: post #133
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…

FWIW, I had a similar issue recently: if you cannot find the link targets, you can still simulate a click on the element using phantomjs.

Yeah, but for my case it means waiting 10 seconds per link, and another 10 seconds when returning to the initial page, which has some 20 entries, and there are more than ten such pages that I need to scrape, so I passed on that...

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

#229

Post by mrmondo »

lylo wrote: post #185

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…

I also highly recommend Reeder for both iOS and macOS, it’s absolutely brilliant and it’s an actual native program not more of this JavaScript in a web frame bloat/slothware.

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

#230

Post by thawkins »

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/

Way way too complicated, needs a setup and configured postgres install, why use an RDBMS when it could have embedded sqlight and avoided all that sysadmin stuff
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