I think this is a great idea. I don't have much time to commit right now but I'd love to stay connected with your efforts. Do you want to put up a quick google form or similar to collect emails of people like me who are interested if you have relevant updates?
Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
11–20 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#12I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction. The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html
Very nice! I did something similar with https://nightfall.city
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#13None of your points really address the underlying problem is that most websites that people visit rely on ads to the point that widespread adoption will be a big issue. Also two large web browsers are run by large corporations such that what’s the point of doing a Pull request for code that may or may not be maintained.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#14You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds.
But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish threads on twitter now. And discoverability is a whole topic for itself…
So even if rss was in-your-face in every browser, how would you get content creators to support it?
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#15I don't. It's time has come and gone.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#16I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction. The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html
Delighted to see that BlogDB is written in Perl! I've submitted my blog to this directory/aggregator. Sites like these are indispensible for strengethening the independent Web.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#17I think this is a great idea. I don't have much time to commit right now but I'd love to stay connected with your efforts. Do you want to put up a quick google form or similar to collect emails of people like me who are interested if you have relevant updates?
Joining the chat at https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community would probably not work as well, as it would not be limited to relevant updates?
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#18I'm in, too. I and my team built several news aggregators (https://TechURLs.com, https://DevURLs.com, https://SciURLs.com) and they are all powered by RSS. Every month we have issues with some of the feeds as either RSS has been removed or broken, and in this case, we have to write HTML parsers that extract the news, which is very tiring.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#19One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one. I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start. It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RS…
This should be doable just using existing Cache-Control/If-Modified-Since headers, shouldn't it? Basically both sides just need to treat the "age" of the feed document as being equal to the newest entry in it.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#20I was a heavy user of rss for a long time, then around 2014 stopped using it until about a year ago. The reason I stopped using it was that my desktop isn’t my primary form of consumption.
I began to expect my lists and read status to be synchronized across my phone, tablet, and laptop. This meant using a service, and I really didn’t want another paid or fermium service.
This all changed last year when I finally set up my own instance of freshrss which I love. But I don’t know what you’d do for “regular users”