Please Add RSS Support to Your Site • Hacker News Board

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#261

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 7:57 AM UTC

sandov wrote: post #87

I'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…

There are tons and tons of clients out there and resources to make your own. You can read rss in your terminal if you like. It's by far the most efficient way to skim through the web. I found this thread from my rss feeds in fact.

As far as what gets pushed to the rss feeds is entirely up to the particular website. Some are generous and provide full content and images, and others are fickle and make you click the headline and view the article on their site.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#262

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 7:58 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #127

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.

I have a hn rss feed. I have it set where only articles >100 points are pushed to it, otherwise it's a fire hose.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#263

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:02 AM UTC

I use RSS for everything I do on the internet: news, other websites, subreddits, craigslist, hn, even journal articles.

On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and keep track of colleagues.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#264

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:04 AM UTC

mikorym wrote: post #251

RSS and IRC I think have that timeless quality that may mean that it will not die out, and hopefully have perennial resurgences. Not just the irritation of FB style notifications and dark patterns, but also speed and uniform customisation play a role. Why let FB guess what I want to see if I know which I need to see to be ha ppy/productive/nonnarcissist?

The strength of being a protocol and not a platform.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#265

Post by nl » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:12 AM UTC

myfonj wrote: post #165

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. Could you elaborate how you measured that? While Google trends depicts decline in search frequency so it may correlate with actual usage, it could as well mean that the "RSS market" is stable and saturated ("everybody know about it, so no need to search for it"). If you came to this conclusion while looking at your access logs, keep in mind that single request from some…

Back when RSS was a thing cloud based readers pass on the number of readers when requesting the feed. Analytics software would use this.

I'd be surprised if this has completely atrophied away.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#266

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:12 AM UTC

favorited wrote: post #86

overcast wrote: post #47

What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder, and a few months later they discontinued support.

If you're on a Mac, NetNewsWire just released a new version after many years. Plus, it's open source.

Nearly perfect for me but I can't stand three column layout apps. Give me a nice condensed list view a la apple mail, and an option to hide the article pane and defer to pop ups (or open in line like inoreader).

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#267

Post by bbyford » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:23 AM UTC

cameronbrown wrote: post #139

merpnderp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you add Json RSS too please! :)

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#268

Post by bbyford » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:25 AM UTC

RSS is literally how I get my news from the web. We should be making useage and protocal better for the modern concerns of power consumption (bandwidth usage), delivery and user discovery.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#269

Post by yoz-y » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:31 AM UTC

Seb-C wrote: post #230

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...

Do rss aggregators report number of subscribers in the user agent? I know that several podcast aggregators do this.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#270

Post by zimpenfish » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 8:41 AM UTC

apatters wrote: post #231

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 main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you pull down RSS on your own schedule. Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications…

> Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them.

Safari has a preference for "allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications" (you can also set it on a per-site basis.) iOS is scrupulous about requiring permission for notifications and allows you to configure their annoyingness (plus current iOS asks you if you still want notifications for particularly busy senders.)

> Truth be told it has never been a priority

I mean, it seems to be a priority for Apple in Safari and iOS.