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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

kevq.uk

61–70 of 305 posts

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#62

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…

As someone who hand-codes their RSS feeds and doesn't include article content at all (just a title/link/description), what's the recommended setup for this?

Can I just spit the raw HTML at you? Do I need to inline images? I'm assuming that someone who's consuming a full feed isn't going to want any CSS included.

I'm not against this, but I'm also hand-coding all of my blogs, and this seems like a problem that would be more easily and more consistently solved by a user-run service like the one you've made. I don't know what readers currently support, and I'm looking around quickly on DuckDuckGo and not seeing many resources about generating full-text feeds that don't boil down to, "click the button in Wordpress."

Again, I have no problem supporting this, but if I'm going to put the time in to change my blogs, I kind of need more prodding than just one or two people saying it annoys them. I don't have any specific reason I wouldn't want to accommodate people like you -- I'm not advertising on my blogs and I don't have any analytics, so I don't care where you read. But I don't want to invest a lot of time into building a completely new content pipeline.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#63
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't generally allow ads and tracking to be added.

[flagged]

I think this is what John Gruber does for the Daring Fireball RSS feed.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#64

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.

I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS.

As far as difficulty in monetizing, John Gruber has been making quite a bit of money for years selling one RSS entry at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#65

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…

Sounds like an automated version of Pocket, which has been around for ~10 years and is now owned by Mozilla; so the legality aspect of it shouldn't be an issue. I use it daily, although recent versions of the app send you to the original article page, ads and all, should you dare to open it with data/wifi active. Airplane mode still pulls up a text-and-image only version of the article.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#66

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.

RSS isn't dead. Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources. Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw, is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp. And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too. Some bl…

Re: monetizing: Probably means you cant execute random JavaScript in an rss reader? I might be wrong on that.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#67
It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest ever success-story in web-publishing, WordPress, reached early popularity because it had first-class support oob for two formats that declined a few years later: XHTML and RSS.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#68

I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging. It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then. In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be…

> In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines.

We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/

I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the same.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#69
post #35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because he doesn't have one of the rel="alternate" tags that RSS readers look for: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting... (not sure why this MDN page is marked as "obsolete").

Maybe because mozilla removed built in rss support from firefox?

That and Firefox never made it particularly easy to find, and even if you notice it, you might not know how to trigger their auto-detection.

In any case, I sent him an email with info on how to add it.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#70

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.

RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.

There is no “walled garden” around Apple’s podcast. They crawl and index RSS feeds just like Google crawls web pages.

Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website.

You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url.

On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use.

If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.

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