Please Add RSS Support to Your Site • Hacker News Board

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#221

Post by rgoulter » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

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…

When I looked at using RSS to follow a bunch of blogs, I figured that out "RSS with whole blogpost used by blogspammers".

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#222

Post by daveFNbuck » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

nickthegreek wrote: post #10

Fogest wrote: post #4

Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.

looks like he added a link to his RSS ( https://kevq.uk/feed ) at the end of the article, but like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.

Without that manually added link in the one article, there's no way to locate his feed. His blog could have been one of the ones he's complaining about.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#223

Post by TylerE » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

mcgrath_sh wrote: post #157

scarface74 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have the apps installed at all? There is nothing I can do in the apps that I can’t do on the websites. Usually the apps are worse.

Watching ESPN in the browser is a worse experience than ESPN’s app. I have the app on my phone for this. There are reasons to have apps on a phone. That said, it is infuriating that when I click an ESPN link on twitter, it opens in the ESPN app and not a web browser.

Depends. The ESPN app is actually pretty shit. On my Smart TV it is a juddering, frame dropping mess. I actually get better streams by opening the ESPN site in Chrome, and casting the tab.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#224

Post by ViViDboarder » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #123

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.

I’m using TT-RSS to replace Google Reader. It’s easily self hosted and there are several compatible apps on Android and iOS.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#225

Post by redwall_hp » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

cytzol wrote: post #44

sylk wrote: post #5

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.

> I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. 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 hav…

...and then I feed it into Reader mode on my phone, or something similar, because fuck stylesheets in general.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#226

Post by chc » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:30 AM UTC

human20190310 wrote: post #196

ubermonkey wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you remove your feed, you probably lose me as a reader.

Wouldn't lose me though. I don't use RSS, and never have.

"I belong to the common case" is not a very useful or interesting thing to point out without elaboration.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#227

Post by ViViDboarder » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:30 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #207

technotarek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To address #3, provide only the title and a very brief excerpt in your feed with a link to the full monetized post.

Except now your readers have to click out of the RSS reader, rather than stay in there and read. I find it jarring and obtrusive to do that, and prefer just to visit the site instead if they RSS did this.

Most readers embed a browser making this pretty simple.

I prefer content embedded in my reader, but I don’t mind clicking through if it helps the author. Though, in my case I doubt it will since I’m blocking any kind of trackers, which includes many ads.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#228

Post by Shorn » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

I run a SAAS for forwarding email addresses in order to protect email addresses by handing out individualised burner addresses that you can block if people start to abuse them with uninvited mail.

For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my service.

I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam, github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my inbox.

There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own domain to avoid being locked in to my service.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#229

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #223

mcgrath_sh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching ESPN in the browser is a worse experience than ESPN’s app. I have the app on my phone for this. There are reasons to have apps on a phone. That said, it is infuriating that when I click an ESPN link on twitter, it opens in the ESPN app and not a web browser.

Depends. The ESPN app is actually pretty shit. On my Smart TV it is a juddering, frame dropping mess. I actually get better streams by opening the ESPN site in Chrome, and casting the tab.

All Smart TVs suck except the ones with integrated Roku.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#230

Post by Seb-C » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 3:03 AM UTC

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…

> RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing.

How do you meaure this? Since so many people uses online reader, it is very likely that one single request made to your server is in fact some online aggregator which may redistribute it to an unknown amount of readers...