I'm using RSS feeds daily (even for HN), so it was a no-brainer to add RSS support to my blog as well. I've also created Tip of the Day [1] - while the daily tips can be accessed via an HTML site, I have written it mainly with RSS in mind.
Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
131–140 of 305 posts
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#132I've never really understood how one is supposed to use RSS. Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web browser? I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I…
Behaviorally, it's a dead practice.
As individuals, we used to look at all content ingested by readers (programs or Google Reader/feedly) and ourselves cherry-pick the articles, posts we wanted to see. Like an old newsgroup reader. Gradually that function has moved into programming beyond your control showing you suggested content filtered via models that show you only what they think you want to see. Buzzword: AI. Roll your eyes.
Some sites would provide a teaser, others full content, some would put an advertiser's message in the body and a catchy title. It was up to the content maker. Typically there'd always be some reduction in the actual markup/content itself. Interesting things you really liked you might have clicked into and seen on the original site for a full experience, fed those people's ads and analytics. But the bottom line is it all largely interworked.
One of my favorite things was using iGoogle or netvibes because those two flagships took RSS widgets. Using either custom programming or something like Yahoo Pipes you could cobble together something useful. Like make your own google homepage or dashboard containing both your calendar appointments, filtered gmail, and quirky things like server uptimes, alerts, API usage limits widgets, fun webcomics.
From a publisher's perspective, RSS is still used to connect disparate publishing systems together since it's a standard. From one content management system you can pipe material to a blog widget, to a mobile app endpoint, to a partner site, to an affiliate. Direct site hosting is down but even now we use RSS to feed media partners like Facebook instant, Google News producer, Google News on [Voice] Assistant, twitter (via publish vendor), Apple podcasts (actually that might be JSON, but maybe wasn't always?), etc.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#133I've been dabbling on an RSS feed reader of my own for a while now, which sorts all posts by their published date. Do you know how I can get the people over at Hacker Noon to add a element to their RSS feed? I'v tried here: https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/1...
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS. Bloomberg is one of the largest new sites; a top 1000 global site and top 200 US site by traffic. It has no RSS feeds.
they don't have full text, but I know I'm subscribed to several bloomberg feeds.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#135What do people use to read RSS feeds? I stopped following RSS feeds ever since Google Reader shut down, and wondering what a good free replacement is.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#136I 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…
Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#137Having 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…
I mean, if you remove your feed, you probably lose me as a reader.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#138I 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.
There are some useful replacements to that Google Reader shaped hole in your heart. I'm a happy user of Newsblur, but I've heard nothing but good things for the others in the space like The Old Reader and Feedly.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#139I 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.
I'm building a service that uses RSS. My solution to the problem is just to store every unique item in my database so I'll have a contiguous stream of articles.
Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS. Bloomberg is one of the largest new sites; a top 1000 global site and top 200 US site by traffic. It has no RSS feeds.
Google: `bloomberg feed filetype:xml`
A little difficult to parse some of the results, but they're there.