It's nice to have a single feed of updates for all the releases of the software I use. Newsflash (https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk) is an awesome, modern RSS reader. Highly recommended!
I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
161–170 of 248 posts
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#162As 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)…
I just want to contribute by saying that CEE is awesome content and I look forward to every video they post. Happy to randomly see them on HN.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#163I 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…
Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?
I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#164This is interesting timing. I was asked at work to remove our RSS feed. Turns out no one but me knew what it was for they just saw the link in the site footer clicked it their browser showed a bunch of xml and they thought it was broken. I checked the logs turns out it gets 1000s of requests a day so I think that convinced them to keep it.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".
Dude, that's completely irrelevant. Most people switched from Internet Explorer. Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice.
> Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice.
This may be more regional-based and profession-based though. Around 2010 when Chrome was entering the market Firefox had around 30% global market share. In Slovakia where I'm from Firefox was "mainstream enough" that we had it pre-installed on high school and library computers and were taught to use it instead of IE as early as 2005..., But also in lots of enterprise-style managed companies (including basically all government offices, banks, ...) you couldn't use anything other than IE as late as 2016 cause there was no way they were gonna allow you to change your homepage from the company intranet home, so there were also lots of people who were using Firefox at home but also using IE at work because they had no other choice...
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#166After getting sick of maintaining the JavaScript in iWeb myself after Apple deprecated it, I ended up migrating my personal blog from iWeb to Hugo almost a decade ago. And when getting my Hugo template set up, I considered RSS a 'nice to have but not need to have' thing during the process.
After the migration was complete without an RSS feed, I received dozens of emails within the same week from people I never knew read my blog specifically requesting an RSS feed on the new site. So I added it.
That quickly reminded me about how important and common RSS is, and I'll continue ensuring that RSS feeds exist on any blog I create as a result.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#167[deleted]
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abl…
> The bar is knowing what a directory or file is. How do you learn than on an iPhone?
files app.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#169How would you even use RSS now that no browser supports it anymore? Do people run a separate RSS reader on the side?
there are plenty of companies offering RSS like inoreader.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering. Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?
The scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and…
Do RSS readers and libraries do a good job of parsing out the feed without all the related microformats tags like h-entry, p-title, etc?
I've found microformats to be just as much work to maintain (assuming more than just h-feed is needed these days). Its still easy to break silently, and if I care enough to make it I'll automate a test. Testing an RSS feed shouldn't be any harder than testing the rendered HTML to catch silent regressions.