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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#21

Post by kevincox »

yawnxyz wrote: post #9

are there any guides on how to do RSS correctly? I just dump all of our blog content in there (250 posts) and it's a lot of content haha. I don't know how you're supposed to set it up and there are so few guides on it

I wrote one a while ago and have been maintaining it since: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/

It was fairly popular on HN when it first went live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31293488

It has a section on discovery: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#disc...

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#22

Post by kevincox »

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…

> Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost.

Social aggregators are great for discovery, they can let the community surface good items, but they suck for subscription. Once I have found authors that I like I want a way to reliably see their content, not hoping that it happens to be popular on the site at around the time that I happen to visit. Unless you are refreshing your feed hourly you are going to miss a lot of content from your favourite authors, and even the most addicted users won't see it all. As an author I also appreciate loyalty of subscribers more than viral surges, but I understand that the money is probably better with the viral surges.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#23

Post by panic »

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…

Where do you think we find the posts we submit to HN?

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#24

Post by phyzome »

yawnxyz wrote: post #9

are there any guides on how to do RSS correctly? I just dump all of our blog content in there (250 posts) and it's a lot of content haha. I don't know how you're supposed to set it up and there are so few guides on it

Other reply has good advice. But beyond that I'd advise 1) specifically using the Atom format, which is more likely to display correctly, and 2) just include the latest 10 posts.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#25

Post by phyzome »

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…

"Expose" was the key word here. A ton of sites already have feeds and just don't make them easy to get to. It's honestly not hard.

It's also a category error to compare RSS and social aggregators.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#26

Post by bluish29 »

stanislavb wrote: post #10
seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

I've built an opinionated RSS reader/tracker that was built around this - It works with links only. This way, you have consistent experience, and the author gets visits to his website. You can give it a go here: https://lenns.io . I'd be happy to get some feedback. Thanks.

Seems interesting, but can you provide more information on the pricing or your business model. Investing in an rss web client is about giving up some control vs local client (self hosted). So it would be good to plan and decide from the beginning.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#28

Post by forrestthewoods »

phyzome wrote: post #25
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…

"Expose" was the key word here. A ton of sites already have feeds and just don't make them easy to get to. It's honestly not hard. It's also a category error to compare RSS and social aggregators.

I'm saying that social aggregators killed RSS. Not that they're equal in use case. Where "killed" means "some minuscule percentage that is large than 0 but less than an arbitrary threshold of my choosing".

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#29

Post by seeknotfind »

kazinator wrote: post #8
seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

I don't think RSS needs to "improve" for the benefit of scrapers.

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

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#30

Post by remram »

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…

> The ideal RSS feed has no ad

Isn't that like the ideal anything-else? What's specific about RSS on ads?

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