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It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

danielmiessler.com

161–170 of 376 posts

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#162
I recently configured FreshRSS on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I'm using both the web interface as well as Reeder syncing through its greader compatible API. While this setup may not be for everyone, reducing time on twitter in favor of reading blogs notably increased my happiness, and how content I am in terms of intellectual stimulation after taking an RSS reading break.

As a bonus, the FreshRSS web interface, while not being the prettiest, is surprisingly effective for going through the unread articles.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#163

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…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#165
post #142
post #39

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 dislike a lot Feedly, almost like Inoreader and kinda like bazqux. Not sure why though.

I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of Google Reader.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#166
post #44

Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog). It's one of the best news expe…

Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!

I used commafeed with various categories and have a mixture of websites and YouTube channels. It was a game-changer for me when I discovered that you can “subscribe” to a YouTube channel’s videos as an RSS feed by pasting the channel URL into a feed reader. All of a sudden YT became usable again.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#167
As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my cryptography RSS feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for my websites:

1. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better modern candidate.

2. we need better support in all web-first programming languages, and possibly in web frameworks.

3. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5 tags like articles, sections, and such. An RSS feed shouldn't have to be manually produced when a crawler should recognize modern HTML5 tag and produce one on its own.

[1]: https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#168
post #142
post #39

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 dislike a lot Feedly, almost like Inoreader and kinda like bazqux. Not sure why though.

Inoreader (at least their paid version) supports private rss feeds--that is feeds with HTTP Basic Auth headers for non-public content. Private blogs and private RSS are a space where monetizing your content just isn't important. This is where people can write personal, vulnerable things to share with friends and family without creating a burden of "now I need to visit 50 different friends' websites"

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#169
post #73
post #53

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…

Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.

>The fair market price for content is $0.

I would have agree with this two years ago but things have changed. I'm just worn down with the huge volume of free dross that doesn't tell you anything. This year I've started subscribing to a bunch of resources and stopped with google news/fb noise.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#170
I wrote this just yesterday in another thread but I'll say it here as well:

I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a follow button is on centralised websites.

e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.

Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.

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