41–50 of 305 posts
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.
If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.
Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article.
I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow.
A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS feed for my client to subscribe to.
I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal implications of it
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow set of HTML allowed in the tag, I don't have anything in there and just have a link to my site.
There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.
RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling.
Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t have is an ITunes style directory.
I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and discover so the open web can flourish.
Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for commercial applications).
Feedback always welcome!
Feed Reader https://pine.blog
Feed Directory https://pine.blog/search
I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place. I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.
I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't generally allow ads and tracking to be added.
I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website generator like Jekyll or equivalent. Some of them don't have RSS feeds. But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed. Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml tem…
I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice (newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before heading home. Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article. I get wh…
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
One of my favorite webcomics updated very sporadically and didn't provide a RSS feed for the longest time; it was difficult to keep up with updates. The current feed is just a link to the comic and is a significant improvement.
The author was resistant to RSS for the longest time because they thought they _had_ to include the comic in the feed and was worried about losing ad revenue.