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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#231

Post by ryangittins »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #136
ryangittins wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No filtering. Shameless(-ish) plug for my project, siftrss: https://siftrss.com/ You add a source feed, include/exclude items by keyword or regex match, and get a new filtered feed to subscribe to. Because it produces a normal RSS feed like any other, it works with all RSS readers. It's totally free. No ads, no account, no email capture, nothing but totally disposable RSS feed filters.

Nice! I may use this to add more feeds to my ruby news aggregator at http://rubyland.news , cool? Hmm, I wonder if there's a way to use it to turn a Medium feed into something useful. (By default, a medium feed is not, as it contains all comments by the author interspersed with actual stories/posts, with no obvious way for software to distinguish).

Cool indeed!

As for Medium feeds, it's all about whether or not you can find a pattern in the data to exploit. For instance, maybe links for comments contain "/c/" whereas links for posts contain "/p/" or something similar. There is, of course, no guarantee that there is anything to exploit or that what is exploitable won't change—that's the joy of dealing with third-parties! :)

Re: RSS is undead

#232

Post by ryangittins »

arthurfm wrote: post #215
ryangittins wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No filtering. Shameless(-ish) plug for my project, siftrss: https://siftrss.com/ You add a source feed, include/exclude items by keyword or regex match, and get a new filtered feed to subscribe to. Because it produces a normal RSS feed like any other, it works with all RSS readers. It's totally free. No ads, no account, no email capture, nothing but totally disposable RSS feed filters.

Does siftrss do anything like Full-Text RSS [1] to transform partial web feeds into full feeds? Quite a few of the websites I subscribe to only show summaries of the articles. [1] http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Nope, currently siftrss is geared totally toward filtering the content which exists in the feed already. The goal is to keep the tool good at doing that one thing.

That is a neat idea, though!

Re: RSS is undead

#233

Post by severine »

contravariant wrote: post #85
Nition wrote: post #77

Does anyone have a good RSS feed reader for Firefox? I don't need to be able to read the actual feed in the reader, I just want a list that'll notify me when a blog I've subscribed to has a new post. "Feeder"[1] looks like exactly what I want, but the requested permissions list is insane. Are there any that don't request to "Access [my] data on all websites"? I've tried a bunch and they all seem to - I guess so they…

There were a couple that used firefox's native live-bookmarks system to register new feeds but I think that was killed off along with the old extension system. Now they can't handle RSS feeds natively so they need to access webpages to be able to register RSS links. Guess it shows how sacrificing usability for security doesn't necessarily lead to more security. I'm currently using Brief, and have been using it for qu…

That's the 2nd reference to some trouble with Firefox and RSS or live-bookmarks. I use both a reader extension (Feedbro) and the native live-bookmarks, in Nightly (60.0b10-32bits) and haven't noticed anything. Anyone can clarify?

Re: RSS is undead

#234

Post by KyleGalvin »

chmaynard wrote: post #228
ASalazarMX wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing how faster it is for me (compared to the web interface) to keep up to date with HackerNews after the weekend, I disagree. RSS is excellent to sift and pick many articles.

RSS feeds for Hacker News? Please elaborate.

Not OP but I use feedly which has hackerNews as a source. Minimal digging and I found this third party HN feed provider:

https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

Re: RSS is undead

#236

Post by vaillancourtmax »

shurcooL wrote: post #179

Does anyone know how well JSON Feed [0] is doing? [0] https://jsonfeed.org/

Not that this should be any indicator of health, but it's worth pointing out that a few RSS readers (e.g. FeedPress [0], Cast [1], FeedBin [2]) have implemented JSON feed support a few weeks after the initial announcement. What's more, my own basic JSON Feed Viewer [3] is getting multiple hits every day.

[0] https://feed.press/blog/2017/05/31/feedpress-adds-automatic-...

[1] https://blog.tryca.st/cast-update-experimental-json-feed-sup...

[2] https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/22/feedbin-supports-json-fe...

[3] http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com/

Re: RSS is undead

#237

Post by SllX »

pjc50 wrote: post #74
SllX wrote: post #28

> RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment. If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competit…

>> RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. > This is a feature, not a bug. I know where you're coming from, but .. I'm one of the rare people who, for a while, read a significant number of blogs without RSS because I actually liked having the different distinctive visual styles to remind me who I was reading. It's a pity we can't have a little bit of styling without going bananas.

You know, I think it is how I look at it.

More often than not, when I read something, I care about who the other is, and secondary to that, I care about where it is hosted. For more than ten years I've used NetNewsWire, and now I also use Apple News and Overcast. NetNewsWire will show me the author name just fine so long as the feed includes it, and given the left to right style of the client, I can tell at a glance where I am. For most feeds though, it isn't really a problem as I have found that the NetNewsWire-style really only works for feeds that post relatively infrequently, not more than a few times a day if that, and even that would be overwhelming coming from one source if every source I had posted a few times a day to keep up the appearances of their Personal Brand™.

I think an optional CSS or rather a subset of CSS component would not be a bad thing. Just enough to style some text and formatting but not enough to screw with the layout too much. The client could completely dismiss the attached CSS and in my case I would almost certainly end up turning off the custom CSS, but I can appreciate good web design and will visit a site if I happen to really like their design. That said, I also fear that even that concession would open the dam to a lot more concessions than I would like, so I can live with the status quo.

A good feed reader is going to have a good reading experience already, and I care a lot more about having a good reading experience than I do about the opinion of a web designer and their corporate overlords. RSS, reader mode in Firefox and occasionally lynx -dump or when I can find them, print pages, are how I can even use the web to read anything on it anymore.

So HTTP+HTML5 is a mess, I would rather not see HTTP+RSS (or Atom or JSON Feed or whatever) turn into a similar mess so that websites can rebrand their feeds to death in the same way they rebranded their websites to death.

Re: RSS is undead

#238

Post by Volt »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #140
JD557 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only sites and blogs, Mailchimp newsletters also support RSS feeds, which means that a lot of newsletters can be consumed by RSS readers. A agree that it never really died, it's just hiding.

It's hiding very well, thanks to browser manufacturers, unfortunately. Back in the day, my browser (from memory, any of the major browsers) alerted me, via an icon, when a site provided an RSS feed and clicking on that icon subscribed me to the feed. That was a much nicer situation than the 'View Source, CTRL-F "rss", Copy' dance I have to do nowadays.

For anyone that's curious, there are extensions out there that do this now. I use [RSS Menu](http://calum.me/wp/) for Safari.

Re: RSS is undead

#239

Post by Volt »

firexcy wrote: post #44

Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and scalable for daily users. Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own…

>And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that.

Well it's a protocol. Just as we have better e-mail clients than we used to, we can have better ways of dealing with feeds. Part of the push to re-establish RSS is the hope of more services exposing more and better RSS feeds to be consumed.

Re: RSS is undead

#240

Post by pinkano »

mwexler wrote: post #158

As a guy who uses Feedly every day, I am glad to pay for it, and I hope to keep RSS in some state of life support for as long as I can. I still don't quite understand the fascination with video content: It's completely synchronous; a 10 minute video takes up 10 min of my time, with limited ability to consume more efficiently. Textual information puts the control back in my hands, with the ability to aggregate content…

Thank you so much for supporting us! Petr from Feedly
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