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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

kevq.uk

271–280 of 305 posts

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#271
post #169
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Pocket is a core part of Firefox instead of an extension.

That's because Mozilla literally owns Pocket, and sure, it's also perfect for an extension. So you can see why they might be willing to take on that maintenance burden for an uptick in usage. And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of any relevance at all.

The relevance is that at browser scale, it's the browser that drives adoption, not the other way around. Removing RSS support from the browser makes people use it less. Mozilla understands this, otherwise they wouldn't promote Pocket to browser core.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#272

Please add h-feed to your site: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via https://granary.io/?input=html

What would be the benefit of this?

I always liked microformats, but unlike RSS, they are truly dead. There never were many End-User Applications that utilized them. I hoped for a long time, browser would integrate features like automatic address or event detection, but it never materialized. And since Firefox won't even mention RSS feeds these days, I am not sure what microformats gets us at this point.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#273
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has NNW fixed the problem where the cache grows to several dozen gigs? If you're not sure, you may want to check to see how large your cache is.

Are you talking about the old version, the beta of the completely rewritten version, or the final release that was released 2 days ago?

[deleted]

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#274
post #145
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why - they work fine, they dont change, they dont add a burden to the existing product? Taking something that works out of your product doesnt ever make people happy, and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work. Its a "well that's ok that we wont take this on anymore and let those users manage their own problem" use case.

> they dont add a burden to the existing product? I assume you work in tech, maybe even as a developer. So you know full well that every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden. > and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work. It absolutely is, if it makes those features better and gives them a focused place to develop…

I’m personally not upset just worried about the fact that security is now a huge risk because you’re having to trust an extension creator that has access to your entire browser history or worse and who is one auto-update from turning to spy or malware.

You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure.

IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.

Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one.

Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems.

The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.

Further the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensions

And finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#275
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the same thing. At all. Pocket is used by people and is a feature Mozilla want to prominently integrate with Firefox. This is due to the financial gains they directly get when someone signs up for Pocket premium. It's not an unused, dusty feature that's adding a burden to the platform and is a net time + money sink. It's something that makes them money . As I said, in the comment you just replied to, even if…

Pocket directly competes against the open web (in the form of RSS/Atom). If Mozilla was a values-based organisation they would be promoting the open web at least as much as they promote their own proprietary system.

If Mozilla offered a browser that people could pay for without having default settings to maximize revenue, the open web could be maintained.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

Possibly. JSON RSS is such a strange format though imo. A solution looking for a problem.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#277
post #115

Are we talking about RSS specifically or a syndication feed generally (i.e., "RSS" proverbially)? Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

People use Atom and RSS almost interchangeably. Generally, it doesn't really matter which one of the two you support, nearly everything does both, I'd personally tend towards Atom. IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality, development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.

If anyone is looking for a quick comparison of Atom and RSS formats: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#...

I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#278
post #228

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, twit…

> not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service

If it's relevant - and I mean, it actually adds to the discussion, and not just matches the keywords for which you try to adveritse it - then it's fine to mention your service. We're all interested in discovering new stuff here.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#279

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…

> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored. If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways. FWIW, there are very few companies…

Or, hear me out because will sound like crazy talk nowadays, you could simply listen to your users.

Re: Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

#280

What 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.

https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

NetNewsWire 5 just released for MacOS. I believe it's also coming to iOS eventually.

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