Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#121

Post by O_H_E » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

nreece wrote: post #110

skrause wrote: post #21

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…

* Shameless plug *: Our little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com , helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, via an online feed builder and REST API. Custom feeds can even be created for dynamic content, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering, and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.

Really Nice

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#122

Post by forapurpose » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

nparsons08 wrote: post #14

dismal2 wrote: post #11

Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it from whatever computer I might be using.

This is a great point; however, we wanted to bring the user experience to the desktop. You are more than welcome to submit a PR to make this application web compatible.

It's not clear to me what is local and what isn't. Can Winds run entirely locally? I'm mostly interested for privacy reasons.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#123

Post by Bromskloss » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

nreece wrote: post #110

skrause wrote: post #21

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…

* Shameless plug *: Our little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com , helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, via an online feed builder and REST API. Custom feeds can even be created for dynamic content, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering, and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.

For those wondering: The least expensive plan is 9 USD per month for 20 feeds, 10 simultaneous articles per feed, and updates every 6 hours.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#124

Post by forapurpose » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

tschellenbach wrote: post #100

Thanks for all the feedback, this is awesome. Sounds like a lot of people would like a web and mobile version. What other problems do you currently have with your RSS readers and Podcast apps? Anything in particular that you're missing?

I have far too many feed items to read. I'd like to review ~1,000 items in 20 minutes, as a start. (Review means: Read the headline, possibly read the summary, decide whether to read the full story, do whatever is needed to open full story, move to next item; I'll read the full stories after I've gone through all the feed items.)

* Deduplication: Which might remove ~5% of my feed items

* Grouping: This would be by far the most important feature. I need something to group articles covering the same story (e.g., all the news publications' stories on the big game or big speech or big calamity last night). Then I can quickly choose one and ignore the rest.

* Speed: UI that responds at the speed of thought and maximizes throughput when reviewing feed items. A keyboard interface is essential.

* Complex filters: So I can automatically process items as desired.

* EDIT: Automate handling of broken feeds: On one hand, I want to spend as little time on broken feeds as possible; perhaps the reader can retry for x hours, then try obvious alternative addresses (perhaps Stream can maintain a db of the new addresses, saving each user from redundantly solving the problem themselves), then notify me with an efficient interface for resolving the problem.

* Micropayments: Maybe over-ambitious, but it would be a great way to support the authors. A possibly world-changing feature.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#125

Post by boardwaalk » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:33 AM UTC

I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app.

I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds and a few subreddits and email new items to me.

Having all my updates in one place I can consume in one place when I want is just great.

I'm not sure what I'd get out of Winds looking at it.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#126

Post by wbillingsley » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:38 AM UTC

boardwaalk wrote: post #125

I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app. I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds…

The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't read.

Nope, most of it's news (whether tech or some other kind), and the social media stream kind of access (where you care about what's current, but if you missed it so what) seems a lot more appropriate.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#127

Post by harrygeez » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:39 AM UTC

boardwaalk wrote: post #125

I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app. I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds…

never used it before but I imagine it wouldn't work well with hundreds of updates everyday? Plus centralized feed management is easier with an RSS service like Feedly. I don't want to scour through all my mails for my feeds, as if it wasn't hard enough keeping with mailing lists already.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#128

Post by andrepd » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:39 AM UTC

jake_the_third wrote: post #111

favadi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why it is sad?

Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the developer controls the update process, not the user. Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise. See: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-f…

I'd add to that a general dislike of the "splitter" attitude taken by Ubuntu. Unity vs Gnome, Mir vs Waylaid, now Snap vs Flatpak. The latter works well, the former doesn't improve in any meaningful way. Why fragment?

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#129

Post by allanbreyes » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

boardwaalk wrote: post #125

I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app. I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds…

Interesting. I'm on the total opposite end... I'd rather have "email2rss" for turning all the spam/newsletters into a feed. I don't want _any_ of that content entering my email.

I recommend Kill the Newsletter[1]. It gives you an email address that you can send all your subscriptions into, and an RSS feed to consume it.

[1]: https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#130

Post by tambourine_man » Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

tschellenbach wrote: post #118

tambourine_man wrote: post #109

Is that another Electron app? If so, no thanks

Web and React Native are coming soon

Sorry, but I’m very skeptical it can compete with a truly native Cocoa app such as NetNewsWire on UX.

It’s such an unfornutate trand.