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“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

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Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#171

Post by KronisLV »

sneak wrote: post #147
KronisLV wrote: post #137

Recently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/ Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying. For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to…

> not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients > How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? There is good software for it out there. Most people don't want to use/run/download/install local software, they'd prefer an API client on their device and a service that does the heavy lifting for them. I don…

Fair enough, saying: "...if there is no good desktop software for it out there?" would be more accurate.

I'm perfectly fine with most of the industry moving along to other forms of content consumption, i'll simply stick to what works for me, or choose not to consume the content if that's not possible and there's no real need for me to do so.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#172

Post by thaumasiotes »

Arnavion wrote: post #170

Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each articl…

Is there a problem with the higher-quality feed other than that you feel silly for providing it?

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#173

Post by Arnavion »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #172
Arnavion wrote: post #170

Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each articl…

Is there a problem with the higher-quality feed other than that you feel silly for providing it?

I'm fine with doing it if that's what everyone else does, but I'm just checking that there isn't a cleaner way.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#174

Post by fartcannon »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #91
fartcannon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is not the place to fanboy over things, but your stories never fail to surprise me. Thanks for continuing on and making the podcast, too.

On this day a fartcannon made me feel appreciated. Thanks! Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".

Not at all flippant! As for 'constructive' compliments, I think the old information superhighway analogy of the internet is applicable because there sure is a lot of roadrage on the net.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#175

Post by nathcd »

tantalor wrote: post #158
nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

> there's no pagination mechanism Atom has this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005

Nice, good to know. Do you know if many common clients support it?

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#176

Post by davegauer »

eloeffler wrote: post #11

Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers? When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article. Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a…

I'm always interested to hear what people think regarding full text feeds versus headline/summary feeds.

I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge XML document just so people could check for updates...

On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service that downloads the full article for real human readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#177

Post by KronisLV »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #151
KronisLV wrote: post #137

Recently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/ Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying. For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to…

>> For example, on Windows I wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird [1] support RSS feeds. In the mail folders pane, there is a folder named "RSS Subscriptions". Right-clicking on the folder shows "Add a New RSS Feed" option that lets you paste in an RSS URL. After you have subscribed to an RSS feed, each feed shows as a folder under "RSS Subscriptions". Clicking on the feed folde…

Thanks, this is exactly what i needed!

The trick was to go to File > New > Feed Account, as described in the linked page. Seems like the discoverability of the feature could be slightly improved, such as Thunderbird creating one such account by default.

That said, the reader functionality itself seems excellent! It displays the items like it would any other e-mail which is nice from a consistency standpoint, but also not only resizes the images to a reasonable size, but also displays them at the bottom of the actual text!

That alone puts it at the top of my short RSS reader list.

Edit: It seems that it's a bit buggy. I just added a feed account and added a feed to it, retrieved the items and browsed some of them. Then i removed the feed account, which i later re-added, the feed still being there. Not only was that a bit odd, but attempting to open this feed hanged the entire program. Oh well, these things happen. The feed could not be removed while the program was running, but disappeared after the next restart, as expected.

Seems like the format support is also decent, both RSS and Atom feeds work, but not the less common JSON feed format. Also, there are some problems with ordering feeds, since Thunderbird won't let me drag and drop feeds to re-order them for a particular account. The only way seems to be to use sub-folders which isn't necessarily what you might always want. But hey, it works otherwise.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#178

Post by winternett »

mehdix wrote: post #167

I still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet. Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.

It's also a great way to back up bulk content from feed sites I create into intuitive files for migration ETC... It's far more readable than JSon by bare eyes as well.

Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.

I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and working fine.

RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion, but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#179

Post by KronisLV »

davegauer wrote: post #168
KronisLV wrote: post #137

Recently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/ Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying. For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to…

> which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients Thunderbird is a great feed reader! I doubt I would be using RSS/Atom feeds at all if had to check a separate client application. Having them show up when I check my email makes it incredibly easy to see if an author I follow has posted anything.

That is a very fair point, as another commenter led me to discover!

Now, in my eyes, having separate applications for separate types of information consumption (e.g. reading news vs communicating with others) isn't a bad thing, quite on the contrary, but that depends on each person.

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