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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#41

Post by drkstr »

kevincox wrote: post #21
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...

I thought this might be an interesting read but was super put off to be greeted with a long screed moralizing over my choice of browser. I have 3 different browsers installed that use for various situations and reasons. Getting shamed by an internet stranger is not one of them.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#43

Post by dugite-code »

ramijames wrote: post #37
zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising.

I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content.

The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in order to have you see the link aggregator's Advertisements and more recently, to provide more robust data collection for later sale.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#44

Post by dugite-code »

tkellogg wrote: post #34

anyone out there generating fediverse feeds for their static site?

I think it was Mark Johnson of the linux matters podcast that was talking about how he's experimenting with integrating his blog with the fedi-verse using aws lambda for the dynamic parts https://linuxmatters.sh/16/

I also read another blog about it a while back, but essentially you have the same issue as comment systems where it can't be static, there needs to be some server component handling the back and forth.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#45

Post by ericjmorey »

phyzome wrote: post #24
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.

Why only 10? Why limit it at all?

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#46

Post by JKCalhoun »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #17

I felt like this was aimed at me[1], so I added an RSS icon in my page's footer. https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com... I had assumed that an "application/rss+xml" link would be sufficient, but I get that folks would likely not assume that exists on all sites these days. As someone who reads blog posts mostly through RSS, I'm very happy to make this more explicit! [1] https://mastodon.social/…

Thanks, my page also was lacking in exposing my RSS feed. I'm htmlstupid and so massaged what you did for your site.

That's two of us now that have exposed our RSS.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#47

Post by equinoxnemesis »

ericjmorey wrote: post #45
phyzome wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why only 10? Why limit it at all?

It's a good idea to limit it somewhere so you don't end up sending 10 MB every time it's fetched. The feed will be re-fetched to check for updates so the cost isn't paid just once.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#48

Post by [deleted] »

ramijames wrote: post #37
zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

[deleted]

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#49

Post by AnonHP »

Tangential question, since I use feeds but am not an expert in this: why do some feeds lose the articles after sometime while others don’t?

Say I have two feeds from two different sites. The newsreader shows only the most recent (10 or 20 or whatever) articles for one feed whereas it shows all the articles from the time I subscribed to that feed for the second one. I know that the feed XML itself contains only a limited number of articles in both the cases whenever the reader requests for a refresh.

How can I make sure that the newsreader preserves (does not purge) the older articles in the first case above (I use NetNewsWire on macOS and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows)?

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