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I Still Use RSS

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91–100 of 370 posts

Re: I Still Use RSS

#91
RSS was and still is lovely plumbing. Given the expanse of its podcast offerings, I wonder if NPR is (quietly) the world's largest purveyor of RSS feeds?

Re: I Still Use RSS

#93

I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down. I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

I am using inoreader.com and never looked back. Even the free version is great. I use the paid version and it gives me all what I need. I can only recommend it.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#95
Just installed Net News Wire the other day after I'd added links in my browser to a bunch of new blogs and realized there was a better way. One of them didn't support RSS! So it's likely to just get dropped.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#96
post #68

I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless. So I wrote a little web service accepts an…

I've worked on something similar for some years: http://ftr.fivefilters.org An older version available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/

Are you also behind the other fivefilters.org tools? I use Push to Kindle often and I've paid for the Android version. Thanks!

Re: I Still Use RSS

#97
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I see in my access logs: [30/Jan/2021:12:58:03 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [31/Jan/2021:12:58:04 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [01/Feb/2021:12:58:13 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1…

So feedly tells you how many subscribers they have when they hit your feed. That's neat of them.

Not only Feedly does this. Most of those feed readers do it.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#99

I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless. So I wrote a little web service accepts an…

I still heavily use RSS, but usually unsubscribe from feeds that truncate (unless it is a very long article).

It isn't a religious thing - the vast majority of the time, the truncation is way too short to properly advertise the content. The mystery doesn't move me to click-through, quite the opposite - it is annoying, so I remove the annoyance.

I understand the tradeoffs for folks who want to be paid via ads, but the utility just isn't there for me - I do not lack for reading options, and if something is really good, it'll find me some other way.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#100
post #4

I provide an RSS feed for my blog. From my access.log, I see that there is a decent number of subscribers to my feed. Here is the data I could pull from it: Feedly 91 subscribers Inoreader 16 subscribers Feedbin 6 subscribers NewsBlur 4 subscribers The Old Reader 3 subscribers BazQux 2 subscribers WordPress 2 subscribers ------------------------------- Total 124 subscribers I get about 4000-6000 hits to my website on…

Something I'd be curious about: how many of the hits on a new post are by RSS readers before the post hits HN vs. after? I know RSS is the most reliable way for me to notice a new post on blogs that update infrequently, and I wonder how many HN submissions come from people seeing a new post in their feed readers.
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