141–150 of 376 posts
I had my first experience with RSS a few weeks back. I added a feed to my tech blog at request of one of those on my mailing list. I ended up writing a python script that transforms the HTML of my blog's landing page into an RSS feed. Not elegant, but it got the job done. My main problem is it seems hard for me to interact with my readers this way. They can, of course, reach out via twitter or some such. Anyway, I'm…
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…
Not sure why though.
RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…
What you describe looks like authentication and authorization rather than payment processing. Which may be a good thing. Adding support for authentication to the RSS protocol (OAuth for RSS anyone?) and RSS clients can potentially make it more interesting for publishers and solve the problem with monetization.
RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader can't see a feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be visiting regularly. Too much of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter account either -- I don't want a "push" model, and the S/N ratio is way too low...
RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little. 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 ca…
I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode the…
> The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg. "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share into…
Most things are not that hard. The problem isn't the difficulty level. It's friction.
I mean, cooking healthy food for yourself and vacuuming your floors are both cognitively easy things to do. But most people don't have enough motivation to do these things all the time. It's why meal kits and the roomba exist.
The minute you introduce the slightest bit of friction, you lose people. RSS contains enough friction to remove a 95%+ of potential users before they even get started.
The reason why people prefer social media newsfeeds is because they have zero friction.
I'm not arguing that the problem with RSS is that it should be driven by a profit mentality. I'm arguing the problem is 95%+ of people will never benefit from what it can potentially offer the world: a better way to consume the internet.
I personally love RSS. Alongside email, it's my preferred method for reading the internet. However, I think the world would benefit more if the RSS ecosystem could be made viable for the average person. Whether that's a better protocol or a better client, I don't know.
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Stop using Apple products. Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.
Your other choice without lots of friction is Google, an advertising company. I hate that this is the world we live in.
Besides that you can still use a desktop PC. Most people do anyway.
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Thats neither factually nor theoretically correct, as all the EU laws apply until the transition period has expired, which I wouldn't be surprised will be extended given corona has taken so much focus and time away from it.
Officially they are no longer part of the EU. They have agreed to abide by the rules of the EU for now, and the EU has agreed to allow them to trade as though they were part of the EU, but they officially left on Jan 31.