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An example of why RSS is useful and important

tech.chrishardie.com

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Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#11

Post by gowld »

karencarits wrote: post #10
kevincox wrote: post #4

I 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

Richard Stallman browses the web via email.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

> perfect to keep an archive of important stuff

Most stuff is not important.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#12

Post by coldpie »

Daunk wrote: post #5

I'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 don't think it gets quite to the level of customization you want, but I find Feedly to be very good and is definitely cross-platform. Give it a try if you haven't. The for-pay Pro model has some extra features, and I have had good luck contacting their support.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#13

Post by latexr »

> So for fun, I wanted to see how many steps it would take to get the information contained in those alerts into a usable RSS feed.

The author did it for fun, but if you ever find yourself in this situation and need a solution fast, consider Kill The Newsletter[1]. Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source[2].

[1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com

[2]: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#14

Post by hombre_fatal »

Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir.

Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#15

Post by k1m »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #14

Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir. Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.

I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#16

Post by 1123581321 »

Daunk wrote: post #5

I'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…

Sounds like you want something that uses RSS data to build a more freeform database.

I wouldn’t describe RSS software as bad but they do often prioritize the reading experience, which is in conflict with data management due to the small market keeping developer resources minimal.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#17

Post by stanislavb »

coldpie wrote: post #12
Daunk wrote: post #5

I'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 don't think it gets quite to the level of customization you want, but I find Feedly to be very good and is definitely cross-platform. Give it a try if you haven't. The for-pay Pro model has some extra features, and I have had good luck contacting their support.

Does one of you want to give a try to lenns.io? That’s a new type of RSS reader I’m working on. It has import/export so you can try and leave easily.

I’m planning for the aforementioned customizations but they are still a few months away.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#18

Post by avar »

Daunk wrote: post #5

I'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…

There's multiple RSS to Email services (and trivial open source software you can use to convert RSS feeds to E-Mails to yourself).

Isn't that what you're looking for? Then you can use any non-"basic email client" to get all the sorts of advanced filtering etc. you're describing.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#19

Post by l72 »

I did something similar for Bandcamp. Back in the day, Bandcamp had decent RSS feeds, but they dropped them several years ago. Following labels on Bandcamp is one of my main ways of music discovery, but using Bandcamp's "feed" or getting emails wasn't cutting it for me.

So, I wrote something simpler using imapfilter to filter Bandcamp emails and convert them to RSS feeds, which I can read with my freshrss self hosted instance.

https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#20

Post by ctrlaltdylan »

Instead of hand coding a scraper or subscribing to email driven webhooks, and managing that bespoke code - take a look at Pipedream.com

You can chain together low code steps. An email address can be a trigger, or just a simple timer.

Then you can post results to Slack/Discord with pre built actions, it's a lot less work. No hosting to worry about either. You just build in the dashboard and the steps are hosted by Pipedream.

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