RSS Box – RSS for websites that do not support RSS

My own problem with services like this is that I don't want to tell their owners what blogs I read. It's a privacy concern.

I'd feel much more comfortable using a standalone tool that I could run on my own laptop (ideally one that didn't require running a web server or even a web browser).

Yes, this is far better than most.

But as a matter of fact, almost all of that functionality could be done without JavaScript! You can make the dropdown work by changing it to use a element (the best approach for both practical and accessibility reasons), or :focus-within, or any number of hacks (I’m partial to the checkbox hack which has served me well for many years, except for minor accessibility concerns), and then replace the elements with appropriate submit buttons that will set the necessary query string parameters.

For example, the button for “exclude retweets” would be:

  Exclude retweets

The only bit that I can’t think of a good way to handle is when you’re setting more than one query string parameter, like the Twitter “Exclude retweets and replies” button which wants to add `include_rts=0&exclude_replies=1` to the query string. I can think of ways to make it work with two clicks (harming accessibility in the process), but none with only one click. My best hope was putting formaction="?include_rts=0&exclude_replies=1" on the submit button, but a GET form will scrub any query string from its action, so that doesn’t work.

And download links like the Ustream one would use formaction="/ustream/download" on their submit button.

serious question: does anybody use RSS nowadays?

I would pay for this! It's common for blogs to go through a life cycle, and usually when you discover them they're already relative inactive. You can go through archives but there isn't good software support for making sure you see everything.

This would also be useful for going through historical incidents - e.g. replaying the top 10 politics blogs, day by day, during momentous events. It's simple enough to just treat it as an offset; the display would clearly say the original date of publication. This is a lot better than simply adding old RSS feeds since it comes in at the same rate it would have happened in the moment.

Something similar could be set up for newspapers. Imagine receiving all space-related stories from Life, NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, for the time period from say 1965-1970.

The current best version of this requires a huge amount of research into old newspapers, and also reading books and then manually connecting each book's timeline. If instead you could in parallel consume multiple sources, the correlation would be natural.

Even better would be adding in later commentary about those events.

Example: take "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", and annotate each page with contemporary thought from each era. So every page would a section on what the scholarly response was when it came out, then 50 years later, then 100, each adding in new methods of investigation and validation/testing of the claims as archaeology, linguistics, carbon-dating, anthropology, etc. developed in the background.

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge provides this and works for me. It sometimes throws an error but recovers after that.