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I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

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Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#41

Post by rglullis »

grumbel wrote: post #15

If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago. The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed o…

Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#42

Post by rambambram »

In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech.

Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech.

After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me. The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#43

Post by rednafi »

medhir wrote: post #17

I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented. Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its us…

The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.

I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#44

Post by saint_yossarian »

entuno wrote: post #23
palata wrote: post #3

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments. Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.

Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#45

Post by rednafi »

palata wrote: post #10

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People s…

Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#46

Post by rambambram »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #33
rambambram wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery ). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.

That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.

Oh, really? My bad. I don't see ads over there.

Auto-discovery for RSS is simple enough to explain here: just put the following code in your head element (at least on the homepage).

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#47

Post by rednafi »

mg wrote: post #22

If you have an application that does not support RSS/atom yet, you can easily add support with a few lines of Python. Or use an open source module. Here is a general atom feed generator that I wrote and published under the GPL: https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py Just 14 lines of Python. And it has been reliably serving the feed for my own website for quite a while now.

Interesting. Also, almost all static site generators support RSS. But sometimes it’s not turned on by default.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#48

Post by molticrystal »

Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.

Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.

https://openrss.org/about/contributing

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#49

Post by frouge »

rglullis wrote: post #41
grumbel wrote: post #15

If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago. The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed o…

Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?

I agree that to succeed RSS must be properly managed right in the browser. The problem is that it was not properly implemented inside Firefox, so I personaly didn't want to use that system.

What I want is a simple counter that show how many new posts there are of the RSS, and that's it. I only click for new content.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#50

Post by lkjdsklf »

rglullis wrote: post #38
frde_me wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology

Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.

The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer
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