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RSS is still pretty great

pcloadletter.dev

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#21
post #12

The main problem with RSS is there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic produced by subscribers to a personal website which is update with a low frequency. There were some services to fix this problem, but most of them have all been (deliberately) closed now.

> there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic RSS has update hints in the form of skipHours, skipDays and TTL to let clients know if you expect to be publishing regularly or not. Also most RSS feeds are just links with a tiny amount of text. A large youtube channel produces a feed file in the 30KB range for example. Unlikely you'll ever exhaust your transfer quota at any provider with that size of data. Quit…

Does Atom support this? It looks like it might be RSS-only?

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its death can be from sites deciding it’s no longer worth supporting, when they do a redesign. I can see this happening if a bunch of young front end devs are put in change of the full redesign. I’m currently on a project where the front end has all the control and none of them seem to know anything about computers or tech in general. It seems like they all went to an 8 week boot camp and got a job. It has been very…

On behalf of front-end devs, I'm sorry. I'm not an amazing FE dev, cut my teeth on Rails projects and weird PHP, but the lack of simple thinking in the frontend world hurts my soul. I need to switch...

I’m sure there are FE devs who aren’t like this, it’s just been my experience over the last 3 years. I don’t mean to be disparaging, I’m just frustrated.

To add to the issues, the FE team has a dedicated QA team, we don’t have any QA for the backend, we just need to do it ourselves. But the QA team doesn’t know what they are even looking at (they’ve never spoken to us). They make sure the UI does UI things, but don’t understand the goal of what it should accomplish, so we (the backend devs) end up needing to do a significant amount of the FE QA, as what they are looking to release is just bad.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#23
post #9

I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.

If you're using https://newsboat.org, you can add a filter (killfile) to remedy this:

  ignore-article "*" "title =~ \"#shorts\""
  ignore-article "*" "content =~ \"#shorts\""
Not perfect though, since it only ignores videos with hashtag '#shorts' in title or description and not all shorts includes that hashtag.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#24
post #13

For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year. I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed. I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system ac…

NetNewsWire is excellent. Clean, responsive, blends into the desktop, and doesn't have memory leak issues like so many macOS RSS readers do. I wish all software could be like it.

https://netnewswire.com/

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#26
post #13

For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year. I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed. I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system ac…

Appreciate the mini-guide here, inspired me to give nnw and rss in general a place in my day again rather than just checking the sites manually.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#27

> Finally, and one of the biggest issues with RSS, is that it's not very intuitive to non-tech savvy individuals. Back when Google reader was a thing this wasn't true. Your browser auto-themed and provided subscribing options for your configured reader. It's a true shame that Firefox gave up supporting RSS out of the box to match Chrome's stance on the subject

07-01-2013, never forget.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic RSS has update hints in the form of skipHours, skipDays and TTL to let clients know if you expect to be publishing regularly or not. Also most RSS feeds are just links with a tiny amount of text. A large youtube channel produces a feed file in the 30KB range for example. Unlikely you'll ever exhaust your transfer quota at any provider with that size of data. Quit…

Does Atom support this? It looks like it might be RSS-only?

Technically yes, although it may not be respected.

> Elements from other namespaces may be included pretty much anywhere. This means that most RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 modules may be used in Atom.

https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/atom.html#extensibility

I believe this wasn't included because you can just set the Expires header on the web server to control cache times.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#29
post #9

I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.

Does this still work? This post from a couple weeks ago was saying they were down. Was this a temporary outage, not a removal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179446 I like the idea of moving some of the channels I actually like to RSS.

I'm subscribed to a YouTube playlist RSS feed and it last updated on Saturday.

Re: RSS is still pretty great

#30
post #9

I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.

Does this still work? This post from a couple weeks ago was saying they were down. Was this a temporary outage, not a removal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179446 I like the idea of moving some of the channels I actually like to RSS.

Yes it still works, I use it daily. They have had a couple of instances of downtime in the last year, a lot more the Youtube itself, but still very reliable.

They removed the OPML export from the subscription manager unfortunately.

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