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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

101–110 of 295 posts

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#101
post #58
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.

... iff you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.

It is a pain - I've found 3 formats for users, channels and playlists:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
I wonder if there are more?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#102
post #59

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. t…

Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.

You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#103
post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

I use a blend of things. For a story that's breaking right now, I go to Twitter.

For blogs and websites that consistently have things I want to read, I use RSS + Feedly (I follow around 40 feeds).

For actual news, I use Apple News.

I probably spend the least time on Twitter and the most in the Apple News app. Apple News does a remarkably good job of showing me things I want to read. I assume it's based on how long I spend reading articles because I don't use the like button a lot.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#104
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles

Try looking in Settings - Look And Feel - Transitions. It looks like you're set in Scroll, which I admit looks & feels really weird. I find Stack to be better. I'm surprised that Feedly doesn't implement a standard scroll like Twitter etc, at least as an option.

Unfortunately none of them work for me. Stack in my eyes is just what they call scroll with a fancy animation.

When skimming headlines I want to keep my eyes fixed and move the content past them

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#105
post #70
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles

Pretty much any RSS client these days can connect to Feedly API so you don't need to use their app.

I don't know any RSS clients.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#106
post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Yup. RSS is exactly what it say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in that simplicity is a tool that just works. No wresting with authenication. No "oh shit they updated the API." None of that. Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.

Couldn't agree more. RSS is just about content. It's up to the feed reader to provide interactions, e.g. w/plugins allowing to ping back authors/original URLs in order to create a kind social network. I don't think such a business logic would have to be implemented in RSS for it to be successful. Separation of concerns rules.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#107
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles

I use reeder as the client, much better than feedly ‘s ui but feedly is still the backend. Working great since I came back to rss for about a year.

Thanks I'll give that a go. I am going to have so many unread articles if I get back into RSS reading hah

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#108
post #8

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of thi…

Where is the HN RSS link?

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#109
post #95

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say…

>miss Google Reader

Feedly

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#110
post #42

A friend and I made a tool/framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites that don't offer one. It's written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of code. http://github.com/nblock/feeds

If the site is simple enough, one could also use my Yahoo Pipes revival project[0] to extract content from a page into an RSS feed. [0]: https://www.pipes.digital/

The sites seems somehow immature to me. The "Shared Pipes" sections lists a few examples, but the first one returns an empty feed and the second one returns "Internal Server Error".

It is probably because of the definition of the pipes being outdated, but it needs better presentation.

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