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Back to the Future with RSS

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Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#61

Post by laurent92 »

Yaina wrote: post #3

I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.

Apple Podcasts is an example of client which doesn’t look like a tool from 15 years ago.

This is quite what RSS needs: Killer usecases for the Z generation. And podcasts are only halfway fashionable. Instagram, OnlyFans… it seems RSS needs a payment model to be fashionable ;)

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#62

Post by dntbrsnbl »

smolyeet wrote: post #35
Yaina wrote: post #3

I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.

I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free

I wrote https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive for this reason(and for offline support). It's free, and should be trivial to selfhost (there's also a live version at https://readr.nz)

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#63

Post by dntbrsnbl »

msurdi wrote: post #44

Shameless plug of my own RSS reader side project: https://github.com/msurdi/feedo . It's not great nor complete, but is very simple and does the basic thing, it has no ads and there is no risk somebody will turn it off or push it in commercial ways. I built it about a month ago over the weekend and haven't looked back to other popular services. If you're a developer, making an RSS reader you like seems like a very ni…

Cool project! I completely agree, it's my go to playground for tryi g out new ideas.

Mine is here: https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#64

Post by rapnie »

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

I don't know what Mozilla is up to. I always was a big promoter of Firefox, but in many recent updates I see more UI bling and deteriorating functionality or buginess. On Linux I'm waiting for an update so Firefox doesn't freeze my entire OS when opening a new tab, and on Android recently the address bar and back-button started to malfunction, and for a long time the tab navigation is really bad. I hope they add RSS functionality, but most of all I hope they fix things so Firefox can continue to be the browser I love and recommend to others.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#65

Post by k1m »

8589934591 wrote: post #37
axiolite wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing. Run it through an RSS full article extractor: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extra... Many feeds are useless without one, but tremendously useful with one. And if you don't like a website's RSS feed, make one yourself, formatted as you see fit: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml

Is an RSS full article extractor hard to implement? I'm using elfeed in Emacs and I would love to have this functionality.

If you're trying to build one yourself, have a look at the open source Readability code[1]. It was originally developed by Arc90 and is now used by Apple and Mozilla in their browser reader views. The code has been ported to a number of different languages.

I work on a service called Full-Text RSS[2] that used a PHP port of Readability, coupled with site-specific extraction rules[3] to identify and extract article content from each feed item. It then produces a full-text version of the given feed. The idea is you subscribe to the full-text version in whichever feed reader you use and it will give you full-text articles where you had partial content before.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/readability

[2] https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/

[3] https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#66

Post by uallo »

aj3 wrote: post #45
onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

Mozilla doesn't have an incentive to add RSS since they would prefer larger Pocket adoption.

There is nothing stopping them from providing RSS functionality with Pocket. I'd switch in a heartbeat from my current feed reader to Pocket if they did.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#67

Post by uallo »

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

> Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text

Website owners could easily do that by themselves; it would be a trivial change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#68

Post by k1m »

uallo wrote: post #67
onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

> Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text Website owners could easily do that by themselves; it would be a trivial change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT

Yes, FeedBurner does this[1], and we do it too with Full-Text RSS[2]. The feeds should render as a regular webpage in your browser, but if you view source on those feed URLs, you'll see regular RSS output (XML), but they both contain XSL to transform the XML to HTML in the browser:

FeedBurner:
Full-Text RSS:
For anyone attempting this, note that there's an escaping issue on some browsers that requires Javascript to fix[3].

[1] http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnpilger?format=xml

[2] http://ftr.fivefilters.net/makefulltextfeed.php?url=http%3A%...

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168#c80

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#69

Post by beagle3 »

mackrevinack wrote: post #56
Animats wrote: post #50

So what's a good general news feed? The Associated Press shut theirs down. The New York Times doesn't update much throughout the day. I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff.

> I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff newsblur has a 'trainer' feature where you can train it to hide certain topics or authors and highlight others. it doesn't work with every feed though so you'll have to try it out yourself or maybe there are other readers that do something similar

It’s basically a “highlight / stop” list for words in title, stories, author names, etc. nice interface for that, but from my experience not very effective.

Iirc Samuel Mentioned they are working on something better that trains statistics/ML on examples. But at present it’s just a “highlight/stop” list.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#70

Post by pwdisswordfish8 »

beagle3 wrote: post #57
12ian34 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird

After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier. While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates. I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and ma…

This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...
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