Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

kill-the-newsletter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 127 posts

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#71

Post by kureikain »

I think it came down to personal preferences. I tried to use RSS but it's yet another app that I cannot form a habit to check it. Plus I like the personal look and feel of each email newsletter I got.

I instead of relying on email as a real time news feed. But getting too many emails I have to category and make miss some exciting development news.

I though of this, why not combine all of the newsletter and display them on a single page, easy to remember URL that I can check anytime.

And make this:

https://hanami.run/channel/devnews

The idea is I can have many channel, each channel subscribe to a bunch of newsletter and I just read them from here. Example my morning news:

https://hanami.run/channel/news

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#73

Post by wiw2 »

xpil wrote: post #65
beagle3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use thunderbird to read RSS. The problem though is that if you don’t poll often enough (and for some feeds, that’s every few hours) you’ll miss articles and updates — and my laptop is sometimes off for a couple of days. I’ve switched to NewsBlur a few years ago. Happy paying customer. (But bot affiliated). The bonus is synchronized phone/laptop/desktop reading status.

I've been using NewsBlur since G killed Reader. Great service!

One of my favorite hacks: I made a google appscript that scans a list of RSS feeds to email weekly digests. Surprisingly simple, and much more useful then running a separate RSS reader in my opinion.

I have to confess: little automations like this with low barrier of entry is where I find most value in tech. Simple and practical.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#74

Post by gxqoz »

It's been a long time since I've used an RSS reader. I've moved to a read-it-later app like Pocket. Do any RSS readers provide all of the following functionality:

-Let me highlight / add notes. -Randomly add things not in my usual RSS feeds, i.e. from some website I'm browsing. -Listen to articles via text to speech. -Work well across web, iOS and Android.

I've been less and less happy with Pocket as it's clear that it's become less of a priority for Mozilla.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#75

Post by ncphil »

mmastrac wrote: post #26
pvorb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why anyone would still use RSS over Atom. Atom was already supported by virtually all feed readers when Google Reader was shut down. And that was nearly 8 years ago. The only reason I can think of is that people often use RSS synonymously to feeds.

RSS is useful as a creator because it's so under-specified that you can create valid RSS with virtually no effort (ie: printf). It's a huge pain to consume it because every single library needs to have crazy hacks to do things like double-unescaping HTML. Atom is the better format, but - like any time you work with XML - you should never try to hand-bomb string output. Use an XML library, or preferably an Atom librar…

The first time I realized Atom and RSS were actually different standards was when I went to write a feed. "Oh. Well that's interesting..."

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#76

Post by WWWWH »

petercooper wrote: post #18

I think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g. https://javascriptweekly.com/rss With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds generally . I think it'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low priority emails landing at the…

It’s doable already. I do this with some low priority emails and marketing newsletters—-a gmail filter sends to a custom email address of my rss reader. It’s useful for getting low priority stuff out of my inbox.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#78

Post by Semiapies »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #2

I love this service. I use it to subscribe to a few newsletters in Feedly that don't offer RSS feeds. The paid versions of Feedly and Feedbin also offer this functionality directly if you prefer to pay for the privilege of consuming newsletters in your RSS reader.

Yeah, I'd be all over this service, but I'm a Feedbin user.

I'm reminded of 15-20 years ago, when there were services to create RSS feeds of webcomics that didn't have them.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#79

Post by kemayo »

mikece wrote: post #70
chrismorgan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exclusively relevant to a developer. I have one or two things in my feeds that can’t be expressed in RSS, such as HTML markup in my titles (which I use for , and I think ). I also have angle brackets in a title, which I would be afraid to do in RSS because I’m confident that some clients would butcher it, and they wouldn’t even be wrong since RSS don’t care.

This, to me, makes me ask what the purpose of a feed even is. If it's to deliver data then RSS, Atom, JSON, or YAML shouldn't make any different at all. But if it's to deliver data and markup... now we're making decisions a client could override at best or result in unreadable/a11y unfriendly content at worst. Maybe it's just me but I've never considered the feed as a place to be putting markup but even if we want to…

Markup's part of the data. Particularly in chrismorgan's example, where it's semantic content.

As for CDATA, I think you're right that it'd work in this case (assuming that client apps cope with it there, but if the Atom equivalent works then presumably it should).

I suspect that what we're looking at here is software which is poorly generating its RSS. Probably Wordpress, since I'm at least fairly confident that it doesn't put CDATA in its item titles regardless of their content.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#80

Post by synergy20 »

Actually I rely more and more on email(newsletters) after all these years. I subscribed to quite a few newsletters and each morning I just check the inbox, no need to visit 10+ different sites, it's all in my inbox and mostly I just need browser them and click on a few subjects I'm truly interested, thus less time spending on ads from different sites. I installed a RSS extension on the browser and still ended up back to the inbox, I disabled the RSS reader a while ago.
Post reply on HN