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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

#201

Post by darekkay »

rwky wrote: post #164

This 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.

> 1000s of requests a day

Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

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

#202

Post by lolinder »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #173
soulofmischief wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.

I use RSS for many sources, from YouTube also. I can open yt from there. I do not understand why people keeps suggesting subscription view, as it is a worse experience for me, than central RSS management

Because it's a heck of a lot better than what some people such as the grandparent are doing, which is ignoring the existence of the Subscriptions view entirely and relying on the home screen to be useful.

Using the Subscriptions view is as simple as changing your bookmark. Setting up RSS is a lot more complicated for someone who isn't already using one.

If you're already on RSS, no one is suggesting you use Subscriptions instead.

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

#203

Post by pl4nty »

darekkay wrote: post #200
gudzpoz wrote: post #64

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…

I've once blogged about this technique, in case someone wants to learn more about it: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

thanks, really appreciate that your post was concise and included examples/followups. only needed 10 minutes to style my own rss feed

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

#204

Post by rglullis »

bluebarbet wrote: post #196
rglullis wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Are you referring to the microformats tags? They were never standard, and they were never meant to "turn pages into things". Microformats, while nice and useful, were never meant to be more as compilation of certain adopted practices by the indieweb crowd.

OK I won't dispute that. The problem is that they would function nicely as a pragmatic solution to the underlying problem. Maintaining a few HTML attributes on an existing webpage is significantly easier than maintaining an RSS XML endpoint.

RSS 1.0 was created in 2000. We are talking about a time where the browser that dominated the market was Internet Explorer 5, where virtually no website would render on strict standards mode, and MS refused to introduce any significant changes if it meant breaking its compatibility mode. People realized that that asking the whole web to adopt XHTML fully would never happen, so a new XML-based format hat was separate from the webpages was needed.

(Also, a bit of a side rant: now that I am working on ActivityPub stuff I'm finding less and less sympathy for those that jump into code and push for "pragmatic" solutions. The ActivityPub spec is not perfect, but it's incredible how almost everyone implementing ActivityPub ignores JSON-LD and RDF and just want to wing with the JSON messages. It gets to the point where perfectly valid JSON-LD will get refused to anything that is not called Mastodon, because everyone else is just parsing the JSON they receive and completely ignoring @context directives)

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

#205

Post by tyleo »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #145
tyleo wrote: post #140

I recently added RSS to my personal site ( https://www.tyleo.com/ ) Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) . The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it off…

> You can find the whole spec here There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.

Interesting. I wouldn’t shave advised a site with spammy ads but it looks like they are sufficiently caught in my ad block.

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

#206

Post by Macha »

MortyWaves wrote: post #117
donatj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Click the bell also adds many undesirable to me notifications like push notifications or email notifications.

What I want from subscriptions is basically a filtered list I pull from when going to youtube. With maybe some tiering so the people who upload once a year don't get lost in amongst the people who upload 2+ times a day

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

#207

Post by Macha »

talideon wrote: post #148
tyleo wrote: post #140

I recently added RSS to my personal site ( https://www.tyleo.com/ ) Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) . The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it off…

Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed. Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of th…

Also, approximately every feed reader supports both, so you only really need one (once upon a time, sites used to offer 2-3 feeds for different rss standards)

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

#208

Post by bluebarbet »

rglullis wrote: post #204
bluebarbet wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I won't dispute that. The problem is that they would function nicely as a pragmatic solution to the underlying problem. Maintaining a few HTML attributes on an existing webpage is significantly easier than maintaining an RSS XML endpoint.

RSS 1.0 was created in 2000. We are talking about a time where the browser that dominated the market was Internet Explorer 5 , where virtually no website would render on strict standards mode, and MS refused to introduce any significant changes if it meant breaking its compatibility mode. People realized that that asking the whole web to adopt XHTML fully would never happen, so a new XML-based format hat was separate…

Yep I know the history, I was building sites at the time. And my own unfashionable take is that "pragmatic" HTML5 was a cop-out, it was still early days for the web and XHTML would have been worth the initial breakages.

Interesting rant about ActivityPub, you have my sympathy.

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

#209

Post by User123698745 »

crtasm wrote: post #177
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)…

Is there a way to get a feed for Videos only? This feed includes Shorts.

Yes, by using Youtube's special playlist id prefixes and the "playlist_id" query parameter instead "channel_id".

Example: For channel id "UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw" replace the first two letters "UC" (channel ids always start with "UC") with "UULF". The feed url then looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFXuq...

It will only contain Videos, no Shorts, but also no Live Streams (in case you want (only) Live Streams use "UULV").

For more special playlist id prefixes see this StackOverflow answer by "coco0419": https://stackoverflow.com/a/76602819

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

#210

Post by User123698745 »

hexagonwin wrote: post #133
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)…

Somewhat related, but does anyone know how one can only get RSS for live videos?

Yes, by using Youtube's special playlist id prefixes and the "playlist_id" query parameter instead "channel_id".

Example: For channel id "UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw" replace the first two letters "UC" (channel ids always start with "UC") with "UULV". The feed url then looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULVXuq...

For more special playlist id prefixes see this StackOverflow answer by "coco0419": https://stackoverflow.com/a/76602819

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