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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#51

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

AnonHP wrote: post #49

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 limi…

Well, to answer your initial question, RSS is XML, meaning for the most part it relies on serving the entire document every time to create a valid feed file. As such, as the number of articles grows, every request for the feed grows in size. So clipping it to the latest stuff helps relieve load on the server.

RSS is also commonly used to serve podcasts, and I've been told by a number of podcast hists that they like this because it prevents someone from sticking the RSS in their podcatcher and blasting the server with requests for every episode all at once.

I'm guessing that a lot of RSS generators have this as a default, and many of the people with their RSS set up like this simply never change the default.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#52

Post by defrost »

AnonHP wrote: post #49

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 limi…

That'd be a per Reader, per Feed "Max Entries to Save" setting - which may have default values that differ from reader to reader, from "feed collection" to "feed collection" (if you create tree heirarchies in your reader) and might (I don't recall) have default values (unless over ridden in reader) from individual feed values.

It's all very implementaton dependant.

I mainly use FeedBro as a browser extension - everything is a per feed value that can be set to over ride FeedBro defaults ; in FeedBro I can bundle all different news sites (BBC, ABC(AU), Fox, CNN, etc) rss feeds under a "News" heading but cannot set a single Max Entries value that is applied to all the sub feeds - other implementations (different readers) can.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#54

Post by bastawhiz »

>> if you're going to add an RSS button, please ensure it looks like an RSS button and is in RSS orange

> This is an excellent idea and I have done so here.

I don't know if this was sarcasm or whether it's just a bit silly that literally the next line of text on the page is a link (the link?) to subscribe—with the RSS icon—in white on magenta.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#55

Post by kazinator »

joshmanders wrote: post #18
kazinator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS solves the problem that web portals with updating content are web pages that you have to grok in their rendered form. RSS allows such a web page to offer a summary of the updating items in a more structured form that users can consume via a feed reader. The idea is that checking an Inbox-like reader dashboard with 7 feeds is less time consuming than separately going to 7 websites and scrolling around. RSS readers…

> Look at this HackerNews: you have to click on links in the front page to get to the submissions, which are in different sites. Gee, how useless; if I have to click, I might as well just go directly to those websites and skip this HackerNews thing. This analogy breaks down when you take into context what the purpose is for both sites. HN: I want to discover new content that likeminded people find interesting. RSS: I…

It's not just an analogy, because you can have an RSS feed of HackerNews. You're no worse off clicking on links in a HackerNews feed, than clicking on links in HackerNews.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#56

Post by kazinator »

rchaud wrote: post #35
kazinator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS solves the problem that web portals with updating content are web pages that you have to grok in their rendered form. RSS allows such a web page to offer a summary of the updating items in a more structured form that users can consume via a feed reader. The idea is that checking an Inbox-like reader dashboard with 7 feeds is less time consuming than separately going to 7 websites and scrolling around. RSS readers…

> if I have to click, I might as well just go directly to those websites and skip this HackerNews thing. You accidentally arrived at the root of the anti-RSS rationale for many HN readers. They don't want to actually go on the web. They want to participate in the comments section, where it's safe and sanitized; no paywalls, no 'sign up for my email list' popups, no analytics scripts, no strange site layouts. They fee…

With just article text and images, you have no UI to reply to it.

Maybe RSS could be extended to FRSS (Forum RSS). Forums export posts in FRSS format, which includes elements that tell the reader how to submit replies, as well as up/down votes. The RSS reader would render its own UI for doing these things.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#57

Post by kazinator »

seeknotfind wrote: post #29
kazinator wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think RSS needs to "improve" for the benefit of scrapers.

I want to run/build my own clients. Scrapers can get data no matter what.

Clients for what? There are RSS readers; they mostly don't scrape into RSS, beyond rendering the content.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#58

Post by microflash »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

RSS doesn’t move the needle. Only a super tiny, insignificant number of people care about RSS. Social aggregators like HN and Reddit won. RSS lost. I have a blog and try my best to maintain the RSS feed. But if we’re being honest it’s a waste of time. I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content. Webcomics were particularly anno…

> I stopped using RSS readers when half my subs required me to open a browser tab to go to the actual website to view the actual content.

The RSS client that I use, InoReader, has an option to fetch full content if it is just a blurb. So, I have to never deal such annoyances.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#59

Post by [deleted] »

seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

[deleted]

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#60

Post by flir »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #6
seeknotfind wrote: post #2

RSS can also be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. Of course, if it's in a link, programmatically scraping the content usually requires specialized code per site, unless you are okay with various random garbage in your data (e.g. generalized scrapers exist, but they might include header text from the site or similar). I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally…

> Sometimes people put content in the feed. Sometimes it's a link. This is the reason I gave up on trying to use RSS. If I'm going to have to follow a link anyway, I'll just save myself the time and go directly to the websites I want to read.

I've been meaning to get around to an RSS pipeline tool that runs each link through a chatbot summarizer and stuffs the summary in the description field.

Might get around to it this Christmas, but I'm throwing it out there in case I can lazyweb it into existence.

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