Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An example of why RSS is useful and important

tech.chrishardie.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#31

Post by spicybright »

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…

Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS is worth it for emergency alerts.

I'm willing to bet good money Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails.

So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line, so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same way existing emergency systems are.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#32

Post by ianbicking »

Instead of convincing me of the benefits of RSS, I think you've convinced me that someone should sign up for every government newsletter possible and do something really interesting to present that information to the public. Like maybe I don't just want to know about water alerts in my town, but I'd like to know something about water alerts anywhere in the country. Or when I'm visiting somewhere can I get snowplow alerts without digging through local sites? I imagine there's a lot of interesting stuff in those newsletters that I haven't even considered...

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#33

Post by 3pt14159 »

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 dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler.

It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#34

Post by throw0101a »

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…

> 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.

Sadly too many places think that subaddresses— username+label_at_example.com —is an invalid address. Can't use it in usernames in many places. (It's been valid in e-mail since RFC 822.)

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#35

Post by rado »

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…

https://netnewswire.com is one of the best apps I use regularly, not just among RSS clients. Good point about tags etc though.

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#36

Post by nijave »

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 think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking.

With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person

RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#37

Post by karmanyaahm »

throw0101a wrote: post #34
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…

> 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. Sadly too many places think that subaddresses— username+label_at_example.com —is an invalid address. Can't use it in usernames in many places. (It's been valid in e-mail since RFC 822.)

This is one of the reasons that motivated me to get an email forwarding service with my domain, everything at prefix(.*)@mydomain.tld is forwarded to my email address, and there's no special character to block. I can then block specific addresses that have been sold to spammers

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#38

Post by O_H_E »

stanislavb wrote: post #17
coldpie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would definitely be happy to alpha/beta test a "different" RSS reader.

Disclaimer: I have used RSS consistently yet, but I have installed a few readers and tried them over the years. Just never broke the old habits. But I should know the gist of it.

feel free to be annoying and email me at the address in my profile if you ever want to (for feedback, brainstorming... etc).

Re: An example of why RSS is useful and important

#39

Post by eichin »

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…

heh. In 2003-2005 I didn't get why RSS mattered, so I built a mobile photo blog based on pictures+text from a Sony Clié email client, posting pictures + captions to a mailbox, and a .forward file pipe-filter that turned those messages directly into an RSS feed. (About 50 lines of sh - "why do people think this is hard or complicated?" :-)

Turns out (1) UI matters (2) Network Effect matters (3) systems that gamify user engagement basically always win regardless of what they're doing...

Post reply on HN