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RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

conoroneill.net

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Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#71

Post by asdff »

powersnail wrote: post #26

RSS has been alive this whole time. Blogs usually have it by default, the big news organizations have it. The only thing I'm not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There's nearly 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper, which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy,…

newsboat supports regex filters and macros/outside scripts which can be powerful

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#72

Post by asdff »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #9
amerine wrote: post #3

All 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.

At the end of the day, leaning into RSS for me lead to me leaning away from these sorts of services that don't support RSS or make it difficult.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#73

Post by rakoo »

mbesto wrote: post #38

Is 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?

Apart from websub, which does require some resources, servers could provide long-polling such that the socket remains open, and give a reply as soon as there is one. Clients don't poll, servers aren't flooded (but do need to keep an open connection )

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#74

Post by asdff »

baskethead wrote: post #11
pavel_lishin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None of those will because they rely on engagement to make money. They need people logging into their servers so that they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS works, so of course they won't support it.

Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so you actually have to open the website and be monetized and fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an arms race with only a few maintainers.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#75

Post by WorldMaker »

kevincox wrote: post #23
detaro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is JSONFeed, but that was pretty much a flash in the pan.

If it was created instead of Atom it would have been nice, but it doesn't have any major advantages so no reason to add yet another format to the mix.

It was created taking some lessons of Atom into account.

It does have a few minor advantages: multiple attachment support, more "branding" images support (author avatars, post "banners"), easier to build JSON than XML in most API backends these days. The one major advantage is that JSONFeed is easier to work with it in tandem with WebSub and other pubsub systems that assume messages are natively JSON, you can use the same JSONFeed item generating code for both pull (HTTP GET) and push (WebSub) scenarios.

Certainly even the main advantage isn't a huge reason to switch to JSONFeed if you've already got RSS/Atom feeds, but I believe the hope for JSONFeed was always that it would spark some sites/backends that don't want to support XML, don't have good XML libraries, or don't want to use their template languages to drive RSS/Atom feeds to be able to build something simpler instead resulting in more feeds overall than if things were just left to the XML-ish status quo. I don't know how successful it has been on that front, though, but I appreciate it exists for trying.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#76

Post by dewey »

reaperducer wrote: post #51

Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably one that plays nice with small screens.

You could give https://newsboat.org a try, it's a fork of Newsbeuter. I shared my Newsbeuter setup a long time ago here (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-read-y...) but have since moved on to https://miniflux.app and Reeder (iPad OS, iOS, Mac). They all support the Google Reader API so it makes using any client very easy.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#77

Post by ascagnel_ »

zerop wrote: post #13

Want to start a subthread here on what makes it great and despite many attempts to kill it, it still rocks! My take 1. Widely adopted protocol, clients in all programming languages. 2. Publicly readable without password 3. Get notification for new items in many tools like Slack 4. Easy to produce and consume 5. Many nice Web UI Reader available

Not necessary, but nice: can be monetized in a healthy way via things like API tokens. I have a few podcasts whose RSS feed endpoints accept a unique, revocable token and check that server-side -- but the client needs only the ability to pass query params in the URL (which it should have anyways). It's a great way for creators to get paid without imposing on their users.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#78

Post by cxr »

CharlesW wrote: post #32
seltzered_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean [...]

Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a willing participant in debasing the term.

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#79

Post by cxr »

pentagrama wrote: post #49
seltzered_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Podcasts give you the RSS link of every podcast https://imgur.com/a/bmgzCFb

Note that the Google Podcasts mobile app differs greatly from the site at podcasts.google.com. When accessing Google Podcasts through the latter, the feed URL is encoded in a base-64 variant that you have to resort to extracting from Google's show page URL and descrambling. If you want to export your feed list, this can be tedious. (Made worse by how top-heavy the Google Podcasts site is just to load a page.)

Re: RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

#80

Post by tbyehl »

> You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox

I feel like Slack has already become a black hole equal to my Inbox in all respects and am hopeful that the Interoffice Mail envelope will stage a comeback for the things I really need to see.

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