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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

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Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#121

Post by pvorb »

MapleWalnut wrote: post #49
djhworld wrote: post #43

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…

That's a great idea. I would definitely use a service like that.

And others would definitely sue a service like that. (I'd use it, too, but I understand why it won't happen.)

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#123

Post by merpnderp »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #13

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…

The biggest problem with this model is a lot of RSS feeds only return the latest 5 or so items. So if you haven't opened your RSS reader in some time you might miss the other 10 items they published since you were last on. Google Reader was awesome because it solved this problem, but like all great things from Google it came with an expiration date.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#124

Post by kickscondor »

ddrager wrote: post #58

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of the…

While it's true that RSS has died, I'm using it more than I ever did when Google Reader was around. Many people are using Feedbin or mobile RSS readers. I've been idly working on my own RSS reader that actually answers some of your concerns. It doesn't excerpt blogs, but just gives me an overview of what's happening out there: https://www.kickscondor.com/images/fraidycat-aug2019.jpg

My problem isn't a business issue - it's that I find news feeds chaotic and want to read blogs directly - with their design and layout, focusing on the writer directly, rather than amid a pile of distractions. (To me, even Google Reader had that problem.) But I think it's cool that our separate concerns are both answered if RSS is used for notification rather than for syndication. RSS notifies my reader tool and then I can see an overview of what's happening out there when I make time to read.

I don't think we've quite explored the possibilities that RSS opened for us.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#125

Post by burtonator »

RSS is dead... long since dead. There are a myriad of reasons why it died.

1. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so they make money from ads.

2. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS.

3. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one really knows about it.

Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform which only has sunset support for RSS

http://www.datastreamer.io/

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#126

Post by kickscondor »

djhworld wrote: post #43

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…

Rather than extracting the text, could you just render a cached copy of the full web page? I don't see how anyone would have a problem with that. Many times you will end up missing parts of the article anyway if you try to pare it down.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#127

Post by jedberg »

I stopped using RSS when Google Reader went away, but I don't really miss it. I just use HN instead, which is like a curated list of the best stuff and I don't have to already know it exists and be subscribed to an RSS feed.

I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#129

Post by skybrian »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #13

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…

Hmm, I wonder if a browser extension could redirect a web site's notifications to an RSS feed? This might be a good way to revive RSS.

I'm reminded about how some RSS readers support converting email newsletters to a feed.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#130

Post by zenlot »

I am surprised when people keep saying here that RSS is dead. I am using it more than ever, every site (including hn news) configured by topic in Inoreader. I even have reddit feeds within it via inline reddit. This way I can see my read/unread counts and mark favorites. I can also quickly export my feeds. It works cross device and it's the only source I use for news, articles or anything else I read on web. If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.
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