Live data from Hacker News

Back to the Future with RSS

ncase.me

91–100 of 105 posts

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#91
Talking RSS and meaning "that feed stuff, you know" is extremely harmful because it adds to the confusion and makes the closed monopolists shine for their "simplicity".

So please talk about Atom and let RSS rest in peace. Atom is technically superior if only because of the reliable standard.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#92
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.

https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#93
Well, I think the opposite is correct. The only solution is to archive everything. therefore I do, I accomplish this with a Miniflux instance with about 360,000 items in it. Then again I kept all my blog content going back until 2009, for 10 years,. That is until 2019, when I decided to start completely over.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#94
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

Miniflux does it for me. Although you do have to have a place to install it. I mean, it needs a server. Whether that's a home server that you have, or a VPS, it doesn't matter.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#95
post #23

RSS is great. But it’s just a delivery mechanism. A great reading experience for me is a chronological news feed, and a list of each source’s latest post. I don’t check my newsfeed daily so a list of each source’s latest post and when they last updated is critical for me to not miss out. I use https://sumi.news which has both of these views, and can follow RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. Another reader with the per-fe…

Miniflux will also let you do a per-feed view, from the feeds and/or categories pages. I'm pretty sure Feedbin does as well.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#96
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 remember when Google Reader shutdown and I was outraged. Found RSSOwl and migrated all subscriptions tediously. Then YouTube shut down its RSS feeds and all I had left was basically slightly smarter bookmarks to a scattering of blogs. Then Firefox removed RSS. At that point, why bother trying anymore? Entirely replaced by link-voting sites now, like HN.

>YouTube shut down its RSS feeds

They had some other RSS feeds than for channels and playlists?

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#97
>Some feeds only give you the excerpt of a post, with a link to see the full post at their site. Don't follow those: they break you out of the RSS reading experience, and trick you into losing time on their site.

That's... how I prefer to read them.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#98
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…

Funny, the browser I use (Vivaldi) has all these features added only about a month back.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#99
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...

Indeed, but it is what it is. You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates, or use a continuous server based solution and receive all of them. I’m a 4-year happy paying customer of NewsBlur, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

> You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates

Not true; maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last comment.

As an example, for platforms like WordPress that support pagination, if you miss some updates that were posted to alice.example.net/feed/, then you can add alice.example.net/feed/?paged=2 (and ?paged=3 and so on) to Thunderbird until it bridges the gap between items you had before going dark and what you have now.

It works for accessing a blog's backlog of content, too; it's possible to discover a blog today with regular (let's say weekly) updates stretching back e.g. 8 months and still get at the old ones. In fact, I've done this to go back and ingest years of posts after first discovering a feed only recently and then realizing that I've been missing out by not having it on my radar since the beginning.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#100
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…

Funny, the browser I use (Vivaldi) has all these features added only about a month back.

They did that? Excellent :) Thanks for sharing.
Post reply on HN