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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#51

Post by SyneRyder »

corobo wrote: post #32
smsm42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them. Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years, nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.

Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles

Try looking in Settings - Look And Feel - Transitions. It looks like you're set in Scroll, which I admit looks & feels really weird. I find Stack to be better.

I'm surprised that Feedly doesn't implement a standard scroll like Twitter etc, at least as an option.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#53

Post by qznc »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #45
onli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no practical difference at all. RSS has more mindshare outside the google universe, but all reader read both, the formats can be mapped from the one to the other, and all languages have libraries to create both. And also manually they are both equally easy to write. I for one opted to solely generate RSS wherever possible. Having two equally suited standards is a waste.

But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline. When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore updated articles. For the obvious reason ( cough timely standardization cough ) Atom is technically and often…

Yes, but the self URL in atom feeds is tedious. It is the primary reason a static site generator requires a configuration to specify the domain where it will end up. RSS feeds can be copied to any domain and still pass validation.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#54

Post by matchagaucho »

leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.

The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#55

Post by _up »

shakna wrote: post #40
_up wrote: post #31

I wonder if "Rankings" from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back incentive to produce quality Content.

No need to scrape: rankings are available by both APIs.

To clarify, HN was only meant as an example. Newspapers have kind of a ranking too. A ranking could be derived from how long and in what spot it is positioned.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#56

Post by lifthrasiir »

onli wrote: post #46
lifthrasiir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline. When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore updated articles. For the obvious reason ( cough timely standardization cough ) Atom is technically and often…

No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :) I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object. You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The…

My point about date string is that, if people really honored the "specification" from the first place, why the `datetimes` directory has eight different files :-) I have personally seen lots of websites with Korean date & time format ("YYYY년 mm월 dd일 hh시 mm분 ss초", see `korean.py` there) and I'm not sure if they are now gone. (And yes I did have my own aggregation engine back then---it was at least born after feedparser though.)

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#57

Post by cJ0th »

0x006A wrote: post #4

so whats a good rss reader in 2017?

It probably depends on the client you use. Personally, I still prefer Thunderbird as I already use its email function (duh) and calendar. RSS in Thunderbird is by no means spectacular but they offer a couple of useful functions like automatically applied filters to delete, move or mark messages.

The downside, when compared to an online service, is that you obviously can only access your feed on your laptop. On the other hand, it's freeing that you don't always have to check your feeds. Also, you don't depend on a service provider to keep its product alive.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#58

Post by ygra »

r3bl wrote: post #39
4lch3m1st wrote: post #36

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.

YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.

... iff you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#59

Post by sdfjkl »

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#60

Post by beefield »

asymmetric wrote: post #38

I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves “stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine) I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome and didn’t always work. How do you folks solve this?

I have not had time to figure out how this works, but in inoreader mobile app, you can pull down in the article stubs and quite often you get the full article downloaded directly in the app. Weirdest is that this seems to work even beyond some paywalls.
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