An example of why RSS is useful and important
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An example of why RSS is useful and important
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Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#2[deleted]
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#3I have a similar problem: I'd love to have all of my Patreon posts in my RSS reader instead of their shitty app or website. That's sadly not possible. So I'm automatically redirecting all of my Patreon emails to my RSS hosted - which does provide an "email to RSS" feature. It's not perfect, but it works fairly well
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#4I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down".
Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you know you want the feed, so spam is almost a non-issue. However I have seen it the other way where my feed reader is blocked because they have "bot protection" on the RSS feed. This can be called a misconfiguration, but it is a common misconfiguration, and there will always be some level of protection on a feed because in the case of DoS you want to try to filter out the attackers. I guess for something this urgent you can configure your reader to alert you on failures to check but that is not even supported by a lot of readers.
The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere.
The main advantage of email is that it is natively push, so the updates will almost always be faster (greylisting aside...). This can be resolved with WebSub but support for that is very rare.
At the end of the day they are both open protocols and you can handle them however you want, although the infrastructure for RSS is probably more inline with this use case.
But then again, I read my RSS feeds via email anyways, so I'm probably biased. My proposal? Support both. RSS is trivial to add support for, and if you have an RSS feed you can add a "subscribe by email" form in a couple clicks using existing services.
And overall these public alerts are a seriously unsolved problem. When I lived in Dublin, IE there was a water advisory like this and their only notification mechanism was TV+radio. As with most people under the age of 30 I don't frequently listen to TV or radio so could have been drinking contaminated water for days. I was shocked that they didn't send out a cell-based emergency alert for everyone in the area. But even that wouldn't have caught everything. It would be amazing if my city, province and country all had emergency alerts that I could subscribe to via RSS and email.
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#5I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad.
I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists.
I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get based on tags.
One tag might give an actual toast notification, one might just be highlighted, others might be dimmed and marked as "uninteresting" and some might be straight up hidden.
So far I've not found a single RSS reader I like and they all just sort of act like a basic email client, and usually don't do cross-platform either.
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#6I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get b…
Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#7I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get b…
I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for reading feeds.
I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon regular expressions, and similar things.
It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or article. Those are a bit harder to handle.
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#8I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get b…
I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple & Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of custom styles and support for per-feed defaults.
Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well positioned to support.
Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me, thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#9I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get b…
I've been using Inoreader and enjoy it. I'm only using the free plan, but the paid versions seem to offer some of the things you're looking for.
Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important
#10I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down". Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you know you want the feed, so spam…
I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to keep an archive of important stuff