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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

#271
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something both RSS consumers and produces should already support, but don't always, called an E-Tag, a standard part of the HTTP standard. However, the E-Tag is all-or-nothing; either it matches, and the entire request is essentially aborted, or it doesn't match, and the entire file is served up. Passing "the ID of the last piece of content I saw" would allow the server to return just the updated stuff, or abo…

Couldn't the feed server use the Last-Modified HTTP header to note the most recent feed item sent to the client?

It's at least a 95% solution; I don't know about 100%, in the face of the ability to delete items and modify timestamps after they've been posted.

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

#272
post #155

I’m still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of “google news.”

Shameless plug: This is exactly what we built https://contentgems.com for. It is entirely driven by feeds (both RSS/Atom as well as Twitter home timeline). You can filter by content (Lucene query), by feed, by domain (suffix) and a few other parameters.

I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.

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

#273

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 W…

How does Newsboat support non-Latin scripts? Seems like a pretty basic requirement. E.g., this blog is in Hebrew, you can see the expected text layout on its website: https://workaround.blog/ I wonder if Newsboat can replicate that layout. Here is the RSS feed: https://workaround.blog/feed/

My newsboat setup[0] renders RTL incorrectly. Appears to convert both headlines and content into LTR :(

[0] newsboat 2.11.1, Mac, iTerm2 reporting as "xterm-256color", UTF-8.

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

#274

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 W…

How does Newsboat support non-Latin scripts? Seems like a pretty basic requirement. E.g., this blog is in Hebrew, you can see the expected text layout on its website: https://workaround.blog/ I wonder if Newsboat can replicate that layout. Here is the RSS feed: https://workaround.blog/feed/

As you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX Newsboat handles Hebrew as it's supposed to. That is fetching the article and sending the output to the terminal. It is after all a terminal program and therefore only displays text trough the terminal. You can set the text width though. So I suspect newsboat supports the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other non latin scripts which are of a decent size. The rest is all dependant on how you configure your terminal/ the font you use.

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

#276

Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.

Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.

So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.

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

#277
I don't the problem is a lack of clients or interest from consumers; it's that publishers want more control of the content and how it is consumed (for example by forcing you to use their own platform).

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

#278

N.B. this isn't fully open source because it relies on the Stream API: https://getstream.io/ They have a free quota of 3 million feed updates (not sure if total, I'm guessing per month?). Important to keep in mind because the app may be open source, but they can pull the plug on it by shutting down the web service. And so you can't self host it independently. It might be nice, not saying otherwise, but for example so…

NewsBlur is a great project. Winds relies on Stream, Algolia and Mercury API. NewsBlur supports Mercury. You can run both Winds or Newsblur on your own server.

I wonder if we could do a project together with Newsblur where we list if sites properly support RSS. Similar to how the Python 3 ready sites popped up.

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

#279

I’ll disagree. It’s been however many years since Google Reader shut down and I haven’t replaced it with anything. Don’t really feel the need to add RSS back into my life.

How do you consume / aggregate the content you previously consumed via Google Reader?

Found out I could live without most of it. Now I visit Reddit and HN more.
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