What am I missing? You name the feed and then get a link to subscribe to it. How does the supply side actually provide the newsletter/content that will be distributed to that address?
Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why anyone would still use RSS over Atom. Atom was already supported by virtually all feed readers when Google Reader was shut down. And that was nearly 8 years ago. The only reason I can think of is that people often use RSS synonymously to feeds.
RSS is useful as a creator because it's so under-specified that you can create valid RSS with virtually no effort (ie: printf). It's a huge pain to consume it because every single library needs to have crazy hacks to do things like double-unescaping HTML. Atom is the better format, but - like any time you work with XML - you should never try to hand-bomb string output. Use an XML library, or preferably an Atom librar…
I’d be far happier emitting Atom via printf than RSS via printf. The Atom spec tells me what I should write, whereas RSS goes in for unspecified behaviour and exotic date formats that force me to look up strftime. Beyond that, they’re both XML, which is easy to write.
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#33Nice idea. Related - Is there anything that can add the select number of Twitter accounts I want to follow to this Atom or RSS feed? Without exposing myself to toxic replies, toxic suggested tweets and toxic trending topics? I've thought for years there should be something like that. Presumably it's a grey area with APIs or scraping.
I believe you can use Rss-bridge to follow Twitter users.
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article you link lists numerous advantages to using Atom over RSS (and no advantages to RSS). Why would you consider RSS over Atom?
That article also has an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, and wastes a request trying to load JavasScript for Google Plus.... this is not up-to-date information. The "advantages" are minor at best, and exclusively relevant to a developer, with very little impact on the end-user
> exclusively relevant to a developer
Which would presumably be why the developer chose it, yes.
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#35What's wrong with email newsletters? I actually like them quite a bit.
For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address. The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter messages.
I guess I've just never really considered my email address as some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#36Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#37FYI, the author has a patreon: https://www.patreon.com/leafac
(I hunted this down by clicking through to his bio first. Not sure why he doesn't put a link to it on the kill-the-newsletter front page)
(Not associated with the author in any way. Just a happy user)
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article you link lists numerous advantages to using Atom over RSS (and no advantages to RSS). Why would you consider RSS over Atom?
That article also has an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, and wastes a request trying to load JavasScript for Google Plus.... this is not up-to-date information. The "advantages" are minor at best, and exclusively relevant to a developer, with very little impact on the end-user
I wasn't expressing any opinion one way or the other, nor did I provide the article as a reference. The original commenter seemed to be questioning the choice of Atom over RSS, and that article is what they posted as their reference; which seemed odd to me since it argues for using Atom over RSS.
Why would you consider RSS over Atom (you seem to exhibit a preference but you have also neglected to list any of the reasons)?
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#39I think we should go the opposite way. I think we should push more onto email. email is pretty ubiquitous. Nearly everyone online has email. It's as close to universal as anything else for accessing people. Instead of having a dozen different chat apps, push chats to email. Instead of a half dozen Slack wannabe apps, push all that to email. We should expand the email protocol to support that.
Two reasons why I don't think this is a good idea:
1. Mixing different applications in one inbox would be a mess for a lot of people (e.g. your IM would drown out important work email)
2. Privacy - avoiding unique online identifiers when they're not needed is a good idea
Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
#40What's wrong with email newsletters? I actually like them quite a bit.
For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address. The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter messages.
it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address
Is this the same class of privacy issue as, say, subscribing to a print journal that is delivered directly to your place of residence (as opposed to a post office box)? I think you could even argue that using anonymized email addresses for your newsletter subscriptions could be the digital equivalent of a PO box, right?