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

reedybear.bearblog.dev

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

#111

Post by latexr »

dist-epoch wrote: post #95
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".

When Chrome appeared, Google still had “don’t be evil” as a motto and was generally considered a champion of users. It’s been a decade and a half since then, the tech landscape shifted tremendously. Think we’re Apple was back then, the iPhone barely existed.

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

#112

Post by MortyWaves »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #109

I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it. Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site. Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux l…

I believe browsers, for some conspiratorial reason, actively sabotaged RSS and RSS support in their browsers. Might even be as simple as under the table deals from scumbag ad companies.

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

#113

Post by rglullis »

grumbel wrote: post #106
rglullis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML. And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notif…

Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...

> But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...

It worked amazingly well! It worked so well that it became a problem for the publishers when they realized the standard for syndication has become so widely adopted that people were not visiting the websites anymore and they had lost control of content gatekeeping.

> Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared.

I agree with you that Mozilla has shown that they don't really care about an open web, but I think you are reversing cause and effect. RSS was already a reality when Google had to kill (*) it, and Mozilla went along with it because they never managed to get out of Google's money tit.

* Not really kill it, but just taking all the steam out of it so it wouldn't destroy their own business.

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

#114

Post by latexr »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #76
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

[flagged]

Not everyone has the time, inclination, patience, or opportunity to “be informed” about all the shit every tech company does. It’s exhausting even for tech-literate people.

Have some empathy.

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

#115

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

alifeee wrote: post #99
PeterStuer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree, you can have an XML feed that does both For example: https://andrewstiefel.com/feed.xml

This is brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

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

#116

Post by bluebarbet »

While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters.

And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source of the article list page as a bunch of ``s.

The more sustainable solution, I believe, is client-based: RSS readers that also parse HTML. There is even an HTML attribute schema, `hfeed`, that makes this easy-peasy and is much easier to implement for publishers. I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.

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

#117

Post by MortyWaves »

donatj wrote: post #25
defrost wrote: post #8

As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension)…

That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane. So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.

Don’t forget the “click the bell” too. Even when I have notifications enabled I rarely ever get any.

For some reason YouTube website never has any kind of notification popup in site either. Instead, the notification icon count increases by one.

Which caps at out 9+. Stupid.

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

#118

Post by latexr »

akvadrako wrote: post #70
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #13

> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

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/

> I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button

Then don’t click it?

> RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

Hard disagree.

Look, you do you, but your preferences aren’t universal.

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

#119

Post by galleywest200 »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #109

I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it. Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site. Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux l…

Why don't you use a feed reader that just have you input the URL? I use News Explorer and I just paste in the RSS URL. Heck, some even just let you paste in the root URL of the site and they find the RSS link for you.

Feedly is a huge beast besides just an RSS reader. Try something lightweight.

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

#120

Post by _Algernon_ »

latexr wrote: post #114
_Algernon_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not everyone has the time, inclination, patience, or opportunity to “be informed” about all the shit every tech company does. It’s exhausting even for tech-literate people. Have some empathy.

The bar isnt keeping up with shit every tech company does.

The bar is knowing what a directory or file is. Yes, the bar is that low. https://www.forbes.com/consent/ketch/?toURL=https://www.forb...

If people arent functioning because they choose to refuse to learn to read or write, you wouldn't defend them. Why is it different for computers? Computers are just as important for functioning in society today as being able to read or write.

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