Back to the Future with RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#31

Post by vanilla_nut » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

Jorengarenar wrote: post #14

vanilla_nut wrote: post #4

I recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.

To highlight how easy it is to add RSS feed to your Jekyll blog: it's a matter of enabling one plugin

Precisely. For anybody else who'd like to do something similar, I followed the guidance of this post: https://dzhavat.github.io/2020/01/19/adding-an-rss-feed-to-g... Though it turns out a few of those config parameters were already in my config, so it's even less work than described here.

It is worth noting, for the pedantic among us, that this feed is technically Atom, not RSS. But as some other commenters have posted out in this very post, most clients seem to treat those interchangeably these days and honestly I don't really understand the difference myself.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#32

Post by vanilla_nut » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

jamesvandyne wrote: post #15

vanilla_nut wrote: post #4

I recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.

You may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.

This seems like the only kind of social network I'd be on board with at this point, thanks for sharing!

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#33

Post by Metricon » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

I've been using the "Brief" addon for Firefox since the built in RSS reader was removed and it's worked very well for years:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

Source: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief

Also, for those not aware, Youtube still supports RSS feeds (for those without Google accounts) in the format of:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={Channel Id}

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#34

Post by axiolite » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #11

The tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives. e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one. Might as well n…

> Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.

Run it through an RSS full article extractor:

https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extra...

Many feeds are useless without one, but tremendously useful with one.

And if you don't like a website's RSS feed, make one yourself, formatted as you see fit:

https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#35

Post by smolyeet » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

Yaina wrote: post #3

I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.

I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#36

Post by hinkley » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

clircle wrote: post #16

I agree with the paragraph at the end: > Now you know how to escape the attention-draining, empathy-killing, critical-thought-suffocating siren song of the algorithms. The only way I got my sanity back to cut out everything that's not RSS. I still use HN's algo, but everything else goes to NewsBlur. I'm trying to quit the HN algo, but can't do it yet... mainly because the content is actually interesting.

When I first started using a feed reader, I looked for patterns in articles I liked from posts on sites like HN. after a while I had enough to keep me busy.

I don’t think it’s an either or thing so much as a matter of intervals. Come back from time to time to top up with new sources you missed before.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#37

Post by 8589934591 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

axiolite wrote: post #34

Havoc wrote: post #11

The tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives. e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one. Might as well n…

> Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing. Run it through an RSS full article extractor: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extra... Many feeds are useless without one, but tremendously useful with one. And if you don't like a website's RSS feed, make one yourself, formatted as you see fit: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml

Is an RSS full article extractor hard to implement? I'm using elfeed in Emacs and I would love to have this functionality.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#38

Post by Black101 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:19 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

Firefox dropping RSS is one of their many stupid decisions (it's not like RSS changes a lot and takes a lot of maintenance)... I'm seriously thinking about switching to Otter (installed it today)

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#39

Post by mulderc » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

smolyeet wrote: post #35

Yaina wrote: post #3

I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.

I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free

Reeder and net news wire are both pretty good imho

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#40

Post by axegon_ » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

And each time I see an article like this, I realize how much I miss google reader. So much so that last year I decided that I'd rebuild it myself but it's definitely not something one person can pull off on his own.