51–60 of 376 posts
Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed.
Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may respond: That's a blog.
This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…
Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification.
1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification.
If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads.
Challenges here would be:
- Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast
Someone(s) should create a new protocol.
FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it well.
In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with infrequent publishers or niche audiences. People who don't expect to be paid for their writing because they want a wider audience, like think tanks or university departments.
If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the iOS app accompanying it. https://tt-rss.org/
I think it's fantastic.
Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!
It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x points:
https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x
Or contain certain keywords:
The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS. If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable. As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for a…
I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this behavior. Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.
Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech.
Similar functionality for shopping.
Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?