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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#101

Post by Aissen »

zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

I once found that my website's RSS button did not appear. I did not understand why, until I checked the ad blocker. At least two lists still have rules to block RSS icons (AdGuard Widgets, EasyList Social Widgets). They are not enabled by default though.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#102

Post by zlg_codes »

Aissen wrote: post #101
zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

I once found that my website's RSS button did not appear. I did not understand why, until I checked the ad blocker. At least two lists still have rules to block RSS icons (AdGuard Widgets, EasyList Social Widgets). They are not enabled by default though.

Kind of ironic for the 'social widgets' one considering RSS is pull-only.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#103

Post by dugite-code »

rambambram wrote: post #96
manuelmoreale wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts

Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me…

> there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice

This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#104

Post by Hamuko »

rollcat wrote: post #81

Hot tip: YouTube channels do expose an RSS feed; you can subscribe to a channel by just pasting its URL in your news reader. You might find RSS feeds in other unexpected places! Use an extension to put the "subscribe via RSS" button back in your browser. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ > https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rss-subscription-ex... >

Apparently that also applies to individual playlists if you don't want to subscribe to a whole channel.

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLpg6WL...

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#105

Post by manuelmoreale »

rambambram wrote: post #96
manuelmoreale wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts

Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me…

In not sure if it was intended to be a distribution system but it sure is today. Especially because the web and the browser do have built in notification tools we can leverage if what we want to do is send notifications.

But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss.

I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#107

Post by jmduke »

worksonmine wrote: post #99
jmduke wrote: post #4

One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product expose…

The easiest solution for this would be to just check the server requests. My reader is terminal based and adding support for js analytics kind of defeats the purpose.

To be clear, the approach outlined above _is_ based on just HTTP; there's no javascript involved.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#108

Post by seeknotfind »

kazinator wrote: post #57
seeknotfind wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to run/build my own clients. Scrapers can get data no matter what.

Clients for what? There are RSS readers; they mostly don't scrape into RSS, beyond rendering the content.

I wrote a program last year that automatically downloaded articles I cared about and allowed me to print them in a booklet I could read when I woke up. Right now, you've got to view content in a web page and it's not very transportable.

Another use case is converting articles into audio for listening on the go.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#109

Post by kkfx »

RSS is pushed toward oblivion because allow to made personal aggregators to follow news, instead of third party bit tech ones in primis. In secundis because are less interesting for ads clicking. Lastly but not least because you can easily archive feeds so it's hard for the source of the feed change the content, making them unpublished etc.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#110

Post by timbit42 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

> Reddit won. RSS lost.

Reddit supports RSS.

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