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I Still Use RSS

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141–150 of 370 posts

Re: I Still Use RSS

#141

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…

This would largely have saved RSS for me. I'd argue there was a glorious era in late 2000s where you could almost replace your browser with a good feed reader and get vast majority of news/info this way. It was just so nice to have a single UI surface for all news stories rather than poking through many different websites.

I understand my using the sites that way contributes nothing really to their bottom line, I never saw any ads, but that of course was half the appeal. The early days of "web2.0" people often just naively dumped everything in the RSS feed.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#142
So do I. Mind you, no words can express how much I miss google reader. Mid-last year I got motivated to start building it myself but eventually moved away since it's way too much for a single person to handle.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#143

I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed reader. Because of its existence I do not need to touch Twitter, Reddit, YouTube[1], or any Mastodon instance, for example, as I can just have the updates that interest me from these networks in the comfort of my Feedbin[2] feed. While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for…

I’ve never had as peaceful a work life as back when I used yahoo pipes to organize all the RSS feeds from GitHub and Jira and others into a unified view of what’s happening in all my projects.

It broke due to a fluke because a network engineer decided to try to implement a software based firewall that blocked rss files. This was such a weird error but the engineer didn’t know what rss or curl was if that tells you something. I changed jobs before fixing it and by the time I cared about such things again pipes was gone.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#145
"I curate my own content"

Twitter replaced much of the RSS use in the mainstream back when the upheaval happened and the move from blogs and feeds went on. You pick the sites and content writers you want to follow and visit their posts when they tweet out the updates. It's not too complicated. You choose who to follow, we are all not at the complete mercy of an algorithm on our feeds. It's worked out quite well for like what, 7-8 years now? I even have created specific accounts to read RSS feed content and push it to twitter. And yes that's thanks to the basic data sharing/formatting technology of RSS that makes it powerful - whether there's reader apps out there or not.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#147

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 never subscribe to feeds like that, unless I guess I really care about the source, but it hasn't happened so far.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#148
The bigger problem for RSS, in my opinion, is the weird XML format. I remember setting it up for my websites and it was a huge pain, had to find a library to do it, there weren't many, ended up using something of poor quality but that works.

If the schema was super simple, and used JSON, I bet a lot more websites would use RSS.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#150
I've been using Newsblur since Google Reader shut down in 2013. It's a great service with many useful features

https://clumma.newsblur.com

I pipe my Reddit likes into it. Unfortunately almost all of the blogs I used to read are inactive, and I haven't found good blogs to replace them.

It would be awesome if HN supported RSS.

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