Do you read HN and Reddit in your RSS readers?
It's time to head back to RSS?
461–470 of 503 posts
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah another thing I'm surprised at, being a relatively new podcaster, is how often I approach people/businesses to interview them and they tell me they either don't listen to podcasts or don't even know what they are.
On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV. A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna. So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away? I have a sneaking suspicio…
Probably all of the above. Plus, for a lot of people, radio is mostly background noise that, in the case of news and talk radio, is always current. And there's always NPR to mostly avoid advertising.
Many people don't want to have to deliberately choose content a lot of the time. I've heard people argue that they don't want to always have to use Netflix because they can't just flip on a channel and/or channel surf.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#463RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.
>"The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS." Can you elaborate on this? How are they related?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_enclosure
Podcasts are just RSS feeds with a tag that points to an audio file.
RSS and Podcasting have a lot of common lineage with the guys who invented blogging. As that Wikipedia page states, the enclosure tag was added by Dave Winer, of Scripting News, which is the oldest continuously operated blog...arguably dating back to 1994.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major sites like YouTube. If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it via RSS.
And for the ones that don't, there is third party services that can monitor a site for changes and create a custom RSS feed from that.
Don't forget to just ask! I usually include a minimal RSS feed example in the email along with some bare basics explaintion. Works surprisingly well. Webmasters care?!
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The takings of drugs
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The weed
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" rel="nofollow">http://www.itakedrugs.ninja/the-weed
Sun Apr 01 2018 15:51:07 GMT+0200 (CEST)
Coffeeee
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Sun Apr 01 2018 14:00:03 GMT+0200 (CEST)
Its just a text file. You can have as many items as you like, all parts speak for themselves except perhaps the time stamp[0]
The pubDate is optional but a lot of rss aggregators don't know what to do without it.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#465I've continued using RSS for years, even when it was a "dying" technology. It certainly never died for me, and is super useful. It's probably the first app I reach for in the morning. I use a few apps not mentioned here. Each is for a Unix/Linux platform: Newsbeuter is a console RSS feeder that's a dream if you prefer keyboard driven software. You can update one feed or all of them, search across all feeds for key wo…
> RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc who publish sporadically.
This!
This has to be the main selling point.
The second would be to NOT use a web service but to run your own desktop feed aggregator. Everyone should stop using walled gardens for things you can easily do yourself:
YOU should be responsible for what you publish - no one else.
YOU should be responsible for what you read - no one else.
It doesn't work any other way. I'm not able to decide what you can and cant write on your blog. I'm also not able to decide what you can and cant read.
If your crap ends up on my webserver in whatever way I will be responsible for it(!)
Someone once said: When you grow up you have to be your own mum. It might sound like a lame joke but if you want lame nothing can beat a formula where one ends up responsible for what other people publish. Any amount of needless centralization will have the usual suspects pressure that entity into censorship.
What is legal in one country will land you in prison in the next.
Employers, government, border and airport security etc cant "ask" you for access to your home desktop computer.
But more importantly: Without RSS you cant read small websites that rarely publish. This also means you don't have to make your own website anymore in 2018 because no one reads it.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Op's example is a textbook example of what happened to me. I used to have a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader, when it closed I never moved anywhere else because at the time there wasn't an obvious alternative.
Why not just an RSS aggregator program / app? Like those which preceded and continued after Google Reader. They're no more difficult to use, you just add feeds and the program does the rest. And no login required. It seems odd to me to take a federated protocol, centralise it in a proprietary system and then shrug and forget RSS when that goes away. I was on Akgregator for years, then Bamboo in Firefox, now on QuiteR…
> Why not just
Which self hosted RSS aggregator contains an easy to deploy, backup, and maintain ecosystem (easier than Dokuwiki), an Android and iPhone app, that all work synchronized together...
It's overly complicated to set up and maintain the infrastructure needed for most people. Time costs a lot.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#467Yes it is. I run some email newsletters and it’s kind of a pain to have someone give you their email just to stay up to date without a third party like twitter or Facebook, I like the idea of RSS feeds as a more direct way for people to subscribe to updates without giving up their email
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#468To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are „alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not really qualified to make this statement, but I‘d say RSS feeds don’t have a social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that’s it. With Twitter, everything is attached to a social…
Agreed. Imagine having an RSS feed for all the posts here on Hackernews and just reading that instead. I come here mainly for the comments - and not usually to debate or discuss even - a lot of times to contextualize the content in question because inevitably someone more knowledgeable will post their thoughts about it. RSS is not a panacea and it is no replacement for social platforms.
Something more sexy than just...
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
...would be nice.
Such a nerdy website should really publish an OPML for its top tabs.
It would be truly nerdy if they would crawl for available feeds from front page news articles and build an OPML out of that.
Flat lists of feeds works too. Imagine an OPML or a flat list of feeds including everything with more than 100 points from the last 30 days.
Noobs will probably cry about it being larger than 4 items but if it is 100 000 feeds it would truly be an awesome thing that I will worship like a god.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore. Basically, there is gold out there.
Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.
I wrote a simple Twitter API to RSS script and have been using that to read Twitter (via Feedly) for a few years now. The downside is that you don't get tweets at anything even approaching real time (Feedly seems to hit my RSS once every 6 hours), but I find it just perfect for low volume Twitter feeds (like bands announcing new releases or shows).
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#470I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off. I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way they're sold makes me gag. I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything is marked…
To me inoreader.com is the perfect Google reader like feed reader. I don't get all the fuzz about feedly, there are better alternatives. just my $0.02
Agreed. I switched to Inoreader after several weeks of looking for an alternative to Google Reader and I haven't looked back since. I've had a great experience; their Android app is very good and they seem to have a reasonable business model.
The UIs on Feedly and Newsblur didn't suit me at all. As I recall Feedly made it very difficult to even read the articles. Inoreader has the nice two-column view Google Reader and mail apps like Fastmail use.