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Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

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Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#31

Post by boastful_inaba »

type0 wrote: post #28

It's a great initiative, but I'm pessimist about this. I tried to introduce colleagues to RSS and the reaction I got was "why would I want this, it's inferior to twitter, non interactive etc etc". So it went over the head of those whimsical people, it's possible that I could have explained it better although at that point when they accused me of pushing "obsolete technology" I did not bother anymore. Even to the poin…

Try pushing the non-intermediation angle, perhaps? Tell your colleagues that with RSS you don't have to fight Twitter/FB's algorithms to surface your latest content to users.

Plus, having a proper web feed actually helps with your Google rank as it convinces googlebot that your site is alive.

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#33

Post by laza »

conesus wrote: post #4

Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it. I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur launched on HN as well. As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS for exactly a decade now, I'll…

Thank you for creating NewsBlur!!! I use it every day, some of my colleagues switched to it, hope to become more successful in future!

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#34

Post by dewey »

boastful_inaba wrote: post #30
dewey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t heard of them before, I know there are some tools to generate feeds by selecting elements on the page and then the tool figures everything. One of the tools I tried didn’t work for the site I needed it for and so I just wrote it myself, mostly for fun.

Feed43 is based around pattern matching - it mostly assumes a well-structured HTML document with predictable tags, and it's that method for every site. You seem to have some sort of custom plugin architecture, I guess?

Exactly, mine is really only focused on sites that are either hard to scrape (login, blocking, not well formatted,...) right now. So either site you want to integrate requires a custom plugin. It's pretty niche but the repository can be found here in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#35

Post by boastful_inaba »

jillav wrote: post #32

This is a great idea. I don't recall finding a simple source of clear information about feeds when I started. That could be why so little people know about them. And I love the design of the website by the way. Simple and elegant.

Yeah, I wanted to provide a one stop shop for introducing a user to web feeds. I realised the only main option available was http://www.whatisrss.com/ , and that's not really user friendly. It even links to My Yahoo, which doesn't support RSS anymore IIRC!

You'll have to thank the designers of the template I bought, I guess. :)

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#36

Post by rapnie »

boastful_inaba wrote: post #22
rapnie wrote: post #16

This is a great initiative. Feeds need to be promoted with the wider public, or they will gradually and silently disappear. Really like your starter packs. > Are you sick of big websites trying to decide what you should see, despite what you’ve subscribed to? Sick of "the algorithm" shuffling what order you get told of things, if at all? Most people nowadays consume news from social media (Facebook), and are not trul…

Yeah, part of what kicked this whole project off was seeing the news of native RSS support being removed from Firefox. I thought to myself "I have to do something about this" Sub-pages not present on the navigation menu might be a good idea. I'll definitely look into that. I'm staying anonymous because I want the focus to be on the content, not me. (That, and I don't want some crazy who wants the enemy half of the Fi…

Sorry. LI -> LinkedIn

Edit: According to iFramely your link preview works. Just retried on LinkedIn, but it does not. Probably LI's fault.. I have that issue more often.

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#37

Post by robin_reala »

type0 wrote: post #28

It's a great initiative, but I'm pessimist about this. I tried to introduce colleagues to RSS and the reaction I got was "why would I want this, it's inferior to twitter, non interactive etc etc". So it went over the head of those whimsical people, it's possible that I could have explained it better although at that point when they accused me of pushing "obsolete technology" I did not bother anymore. Even to the poin…

I usually explain that the people that share stuff on Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit, or HN) often get their news through RSS. It might not be used by everyone, but it’s used by the users at the centre of the networks you’re trying to reach.

Re: Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

#38

Post by icebraining »

wruza wrote: post #2

Non-social user here (no fb, twitter, other feeds except hn and few forums). I cannot remember why exactly rss stopped fitting my needs. I was using a standalone reader before iphone was a thing, then google reader, and then began to simply check my 3-5 sites at non-busy times. I think that for HN I miss at least 1/2 of all topics since it is “a fast board”, among others. I don’t really want to be overwhelmed by all…

In my case, RSS is not for HN or other high-traffic sites, it's for those blogs that rarely update but which posts are always at least worth looking at. For example, Oona Räisänen posts just a few times a year, but I read every single one.
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