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Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

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Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#101

Post by chris37879 »

imglorp wrote: post #54
petercooper wrote: post #18

I think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g. https://javascriptweekly.com/rss With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds generally . I think it'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low priority emails landing at the…

Another HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness. I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would make them sad.

I seem to recall years ago google was looking to make that sort of thing useless because they would always download all images in an email and serve them from their cache... wonder what changed?

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#102

Post by smoe »

kureikain wrote: post #71

I think it came down to personal preferences. I tried to use RSS but it's yet another app that I cannot form a habit to check it. Plus I like the personal look and feel of each email newsletter I got. I instead of relying on email as a real time news feed. But getting too many emails I have to category and make miss some exciting development news. I though of this, why not combine all of the newsletter and display th…

I kinda abandoned email as a tool of communication long ago and just use it to centralize slow notifications. Slow meaning, things I kind of like or want to know about eventually but not important enough to show a distracting notification on screen. Having them filtered gives me a way to more or less easily check in every now and then what is happing on a given topic

But for me, the more import aspect is being in charge when to use a tool than what the tool is and having habits around it.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#103

Post by Fogest »

chris37879 wrote: post #101
imglorp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness. I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would make them sad.

I seem to recall years ago google was looking to make that sort of thing useless because they would always download all images in an email and serve them from their cache... wonder what changed?

Google still does cache them do they not? I am pretty sure all the emailer would know is that the email got received, but I don't think they actually know if you open it. However if you click a link they would know.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#104

Post by Fogest »

syoc wrote: post #85
kureikain wrote: post #71

I think it came down to personal preferences. I tried to use RSS but it's yet another app that I cannot form a habit to check it. Plus I like the personal look and feel of each email newsletter I got. I instead of relying on email as a real time news feed. But getting too many emails I have to category and make miss some exciting development news. I though of this, why not combine all of the newsletter and display th…

RSS being pull and not push is a great feature IMO. You check up on your feeds when you want to, if you never do it might not really be worth your time or you might not enjoy it. If you really want some kind of reminder then some readers like tt-rss can send daily digest.

I use FreshRSS which is similar to tt-rss. I really think I should turn on email digests in it because I often find myself forgetting to check my reader some days and then it feels cumbersome to try and "catch-up" with the feeds.

I actually really like the idea of being able to convert newsletters into RSS feeds. I have a decent amount of newsletter I currently get and for a lot of them the only reason I have them in newsletter form is because they offered no RSS option. So if I wanted to stay up to date one of my only options was newsletters.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#105

Post by Fogest »

wiw2 wrote: post #73
xpil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using NewsBlur since G killed Reader. Great service!

One of my favorite hacks: I made a google appscript that scans a list of RSS feeds to email weekly digests. Surprisingly simple, and much more useful then running a separate RSS reader in my opinion. I have to confess: little automations like this with low barrier of entry is where I find most value in tech. Simple and practical.

I use a self-hosted RSS reader, I'm curious if you could use something like that and have some email digests generated from that. I know tt-rss supports sending email digests. You could set it up to check sites on a less frequent schedule and then the setup sounds just like what you're talking about.

You may be fine with your solution so this comment is more geared towards others who are interested in a similar solution.

I am sure managed RSS platforms also offer some kind of email digest if you don't want to self-host.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#106

Post by Fogest »

onli wrote: post #50
petecooper wrote: post #49

Aside: a question for proponents of syndication (e.g. Atom, RSS) – as a publisher, are there other formats that should be investigated?

No. You need only one, either Atom or RSS.

I believe you can also however add on to Atom/RSS. Many feed readers now also support the WebSub [1] standard which allows them to receive instant push notifications of new articles. It kinda speeds up getting things as you don't have to rely on exclusively the pulling model. Sites like WordPress, Blogger, FeedBurner, Mastodon, and Friendica I believe are all examples of sites that support it.

It basically extends Atom/RSS to have another feature. Clients that don't support it can still pull like normal. Wikipedia summarizes the technology a bit nicer than the first link [2]

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#107

Post by Fogest »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #20
benlumen wrote: post #12

Nice idea. Related - Is there anything that can add the select number of Twitter accounts I want to follow to this Atom or RSS feed? Without exposing myself to toxic replies, toxic suggested tweets and toxic trending topics? I've thought for years there should be something like that. Presumably it's a grey area with APIs or scraping.

I’m sure there's a way to do it but Twitter dropped RSS/Atom support from their API in 2012 [1], so it would require scraping or using some sort of other endpoint-managed control of the feed. There have historically been usage limits on how many tweets you could retrieve without paying, but I’m not sure how much that has changed since Twitter overhauled its API last year. It’s a shame that many of the tools and featu…

It all comes down to ads. Twitter can't show ads so easily via API's. I think I even remember Twitter considering sticking ads in batches of tweets pulled from the API. Can't recall if they did it or not or if I'm misremembering.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#108

Post by Fogest »

t0astbread wrote: post #42
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I've just never really considered my email address as some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.

Neither do I, really, but I would be concerned about newsletter hosts being able to build a profile of my interests based on what I'm subscribed to. If I can just use Atom/RSS over HTTP instead I can avoid that easily.

This is why I like this site. Some sites I want to keep up to date on don't have an RSS feed, but they have a newsletter. I'm happy this site was shared and I am definitely going to make use of it!

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#109

Post by dirtyid »

I throw my newsletters in a shared folder and use various TTS programs to listen to them as podcasts. Working to cobble together a manual but not particularly intensive process where news letters are aggregated into a podcast with newsletter as transcript with timestamps. Some podcast apps have bookmark/note support which is a bonus, though non are cross platform. Ideal setup is physical button press will highlight current sentence and spit out a summary. I can see a service with some sort of collaboration system especially with improving TTS quality.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#110

Post by chrismorgan »

mikece wrote: post #70
chrismorgan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exclusively relevant to a developer. I have one or two things in my feeds that can’t be expressed in RSS, such as HTML markup in my titles (which I use for , and I think ). I also have angle brackets in a title, which I would be afraid to do in RSS because I’m confident that some clients would butcher it, and they wouldn’t even be wrong since RSS don’t care.

This, to me, makes me ask what the purpose of a feed even is. If it's to deliver data then RSS, Atom, JSON, or YAML shouldn't make any different at all. But if it's to deliver data and markup... now we're making decisions a client could override at best or result in unreadable/a11y unfriendly content at worst. Maybe it's just me but I've never considered the feed as a place to be putting markup but even if we want to…

CDATA is purely a convenient way of encoding character data, of avoiding needing to escape all the time. It doesn’t change the semantics at all, and if any client does vary the semantics based on this, it is wrong to do so.

RSS doesn’t say what format any of its content is in. You have to guess if it’s plain text or HTML. This can easily go wrong. The result is that you can’t trust the handling of characters like in titles or in supposedly-plain-text descriptions in RSS feeds.

Seriously, just use Atom.

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