Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably one that plays nice with small screens.
RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
51–60 of 135 posts
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.
The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?
There's no point now, I suppose.
The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium, "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g. "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS. Anybody could play in that ecosystem.
Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#53Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do do polling, what interval?
Yes, you need to poll. Ideally with If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers so you can save some resources if the feed hasn't changed.
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#54All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.
It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
> Twitter
It used to; killed off ~2013:
* https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed...
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#55Don't call it a comeback! There's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom. As one of the folks involved in creating Atom I'm frustrated with the outcome. These days it'd probably be JSON, right?
> There's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom.
Are there any technical reasons to use RSS instead of Atom in new deployments?
(I can perhaps see leaving legacy RSS links created pre-Atom in place.)
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#56Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do do polling, what interval?
I don't know if they are still in use, but there are pub/sub services that can be used for notifications.
This was created to avoid unnecessary polling of RSS/Atom feeds:
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.
The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?
Because it was broadcast to your iPod. Where iPod means a non-networked personal media player which in the 00s overwhelmingly meant an iPod.
The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod" is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod especially defaulted to syncing your computer library when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to charge at the end of the day.
When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content exclusive to their platform.
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#58All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.
One thing that's been corrosive to rss the past couple years have been podcast platforms. I find more podcasts (free ones) that can only be accessed through platforms like Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or Anchor, with no rss feed link to use in a platform agnostic podcatcher app.
I have only noticed that on spotify, but, without a spotify subscription, I hate it. I have had several podcasts I used to listen to move to spotify-only.
(I actually still listen to them on an Apple iPod nano....)
I could believe it being true of some of other platforms, trying to have "our-platform-only" content but I haven't seen it and am not finding confirmation. I don't think it's true of Google Podcasts, that they have any of their own content.
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?
And yet here we are clicking a floppy disk icon to save it. Language and meaning change over time. That's OK.
Of course it's okay for languages to evolve, but here's how you're missing the point:
Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe created a proprietary platform for delivering internet content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-protected PDF files delivered using proprietary protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.
This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how long do we think that will last?
Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
#60I think what really and significantly curbed RSS usage what Google reducing effective tooling (allowing you to see/subscribe to RSS in the browser) combined with killing Google Reader. Of course by that time, half my feeds were just links to the full URL (ads and all). Then, they take the next step and introduce AMP, which is really cool in a way, but effectively makes Google the gateway to it all, and Google Ads especially.
Google makes ad revenue, cuts out most of the sites themselves and increases google value, while reducing the value of the actual site producing the content.