91–100 of 248 posts
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> Podcasts typically use RSS I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.
I'd say that the only thing that reliably differentiates a _podcast_ from a _radio show_ is just that the podcast's method of delivery is RSS.
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I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader. Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/
> what would that even do? Open the current page's RSS feed in my configured client. Failing that, copy its URL. Absolute minimum, it's a shortcut for having to view source, cmd-f, "RSS", cmd-c
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…
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Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.
> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
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?
The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top.
HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and do something useful with it, we don't need yet another format that duplicates the information that is already on the website.
Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet: And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your…
My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.
For example: https://andrewstiefel.com/feed.xml
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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 am not talking about RSS, I am talking about plain old bookmarks. Browser never would give you notification when something you bookmarked changed. The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top. HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and d…
And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notification when the page has changed at all", think how long would it take for every marketer use that "feature" to simply make minimal changes in the site to trick their viewers into inflating their page view numbers...