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Making RSS More Fun

matduggan.com

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Re: Making RSS More Fun

#21

Post by latexr »

throw0101d wrote: post #16

People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular pros/cons/trade-offs for each? I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at least providing RSS (even if there are also other options): * https://podcasters.apple.co…

> But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)?

I’ve been doing JSON feeds exclusively since it came out. Support in readers is pretty good (Universal? Near universal?) and they’re super simple to generate and consume programatically with standard tools in current mainstream programming languages.

When adding to my feed reader, I’ll take whatever and don’t care¹. When generating it myself or consuming via a script, 100% JSON feed.

¹ In practice that means RSS or JSON. I’ve been using RSS for some two decades and never cared for Atom. I don’t have anything against it, I just never saw the need.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#23

Post by jandrusk »

He clearly hasn't met elfeed that you run from within Emacs; I've used all of the major RSS readers over the years and elfeed is unbelievably versatile as are most things in Emacs, but learning Emacs might be worth it just for elfeed and org-mode.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#24

Post by N3mor »

I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#25

Post by latexr »

dan_h wrote: post #12

I've felt similarly about RSS for a while now--I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it. Another issue is when I try to get anyone even slightly non-technical to use RSS they bounce off immediately; it sadly just seems too complex/too much overhead for a large number of users. I've been trying to build a site/app that adds some features menti…

> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

Seems to me your problem lies in this part:

> giant collection

Don’t add so much that you can’t deal with it. Concentrate on infrequently updated sources. Any news website, for example, is too much and shouldn’t be in your reader. A small creator or YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything does go in.

If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and should remove every single one you don’t feel is absolutely valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read instead of removing.

If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you’re not consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#27

Post by turoczy »

N3mor wrote: post #24

I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.

Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of the content.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#28

Post by bjord »

had to uninstall this right away. among other things, every key shortcut is already in use elsewhere (and they cannot be changed)

for reference: alt+shift+s, alt+shift+u, and alt+shift+d

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#29

Post by N3mor »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #9
PurpleRamen wrote: post #7

> I rarely want to read all of a websites content from beginning to end I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check e…

When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.

My Inoreader became unmanageable and reminded me a lot of the reason I quit using Gmail: over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble.

Re: Making RSS More Fun

#30

Post by al_borland »

N3mor wrote: post #24

I love this - thank you for your work! Stumble Upon was one of those sites that I trully enjoyed. I'm glad to see something similar. I wish someone would develop a spiritual successor to DIGG.

Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.
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