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Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#101

Post by sdfjkl »

fcorr wrote: post #45
drharris wrote: post #23

I started with Feedly, but realized there is no OPML export, which locks me in. This Reader situation taught me to not be locked in ever again. Plus, I'm not entirely convinced the transition from the Google backend is going to be smooth, and I don't care for the interface. The Chrome extension also runs in the background and keeps my LastPass authentications open, a huge, huge security risk. I have since switched to…

The web interface also requires you to install their browser plugin, which is less than ideal if you're using multiple computers.

I still don't understand why it requires a browser plugin at all. I find it very suspicious and it put me off Feedly.

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#102

Post by acemarke »

Settled on Bazqux ( https://bazqux.com ). Good clean GR-like UI, and there appears to be a fork of the gReader Android app called News+ ( https://github.com/noinnion/newsplus ) that can use Bazqux as a syncing backend. Neither's perfect, but they're looking reasonable so far.

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#104

Post by juliogreff »

pauljonas wrote: post #75

None as of yet, though Feedly is the only contender at this point for me. But the big deal breaker is the lack of search (which was present when I initially loaded up my Google Reader subscribed feeds, but the Feedly overlords deactivated when the flood of new users made it a performance issue). It is on the !todo! list so I hope it is restored. Without search, an RSS reader is just not as useful, at least with my vo…

You'd be a great user to have when doing stress testing :)

Would you mind sharing your opml (if there's nothing sensitive or that you wouldn't want to share in there)? I'm one of the developers of lector, and I'm having trouble finding people with enough feeds to put some real load on our servers.

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#105

Post by drharris »

sdfjkl wrote: post #101
fcorr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web interface also requires you to install their browser plugin, which is less than ideal if you're using multiple computers.

I still don't understand why it requires a browser plugin at all. I find it very suspicious and it put me off Feedly.

This, totally. They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick. I really don't understand the rationale here. What does a plugin platform give them that a simple website does not, if not additional tracking behavior? Does their monetization strategy involve selling data?

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#107

Post by sphilipakis »

drharris wrote: post #105
sdfjkl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why it requires a browser plugin at all. I find it very suspicious and it put me off Feedly.

This, totally. They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick. I really don't understand the rationale here. What does a plugin platform give them that a simple website does not, if not additional tracking behavior? Does their monetization strategy involve selling data?

Actually creating an add-on allowed a lot more than offering a simple web-site. Remember Feedly is not new, it's been out there for years. Back then, offering an add-on allowed them to lower the stress on their platform by allowing most of the network trafic to be directly between your browser and google's servers. Now they have migrated on their own Cloud platform, they will probably very soon offer a plain site version without the need for add-ons.

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#108

Post by sphilipakis »

drharris wrote: post #105
sdfjkl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand why it requires a browser plugin at all. I find it very suspicious and it put me off Feedly.

This, totally. They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick. I really don't understand the rationale here. What does a plugin platform give them that a simple website does not, if not additional tracking behavior? Does their monetization strategy involve selling data?

"They basically have to make a custom app for every platform/browser, when a single responsive website would have done the trick" ... well their are 2 things there: packaging add-ons for multiple platforms is not difficult. You create some kind of packaging wrapper code around a common codebase. It's building a codebase which works on many javascript and DOM engines that takes time and effort. So building a "responsive website" (that works on most browsers) is not much "easier" than packaging custom app for each browser.

Re: Poll: Which RSS reader have you switched to?

#110

Post by codebeaker »

I was really hoping that someone would come up with a Go language "all-in-one" executable, including resources, etc, that could be started and bound to a port and would "just work" after Sameer Ajmani's video at GoogleIO about advances Go concurrency patterns, he implemented the collector side of a feed reader, and open sourced the code under a liberal licence. That together with a resource bundler such as https://github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata to avoid even having to take care of the HTML/CSS assets seems like a potential big win for these middle-of-the-road complexity web apps.
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