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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#71

Post by darekkay »

rambambram wrote: post #68

Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Sometimes I leave a short comment here on HN to let somebody know I subscribed to their feed. I hope it encourages people that put energy and heart into quality content to keep making that content. I try to not overdo that here on HN, because it adds little to the g…

> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics.

I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible.

https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#72

Post by Xymist »

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…

I _don't_ particularly want to participate in the comments section on most sites. Full text and image content of the article and nothing further is absolutely what I want out of an RSS feed - I should not have to leave my reader or deal with the internet at large to read the things that interest me.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#73

Post by charcircuit »

equinoxnemesis wrote: post #47
ericjmorey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why only 10? Why limit it at all?

It's a good idea to limit it somewhere so you don't end up sending 10 MB every time it's fetched. The feed will be re-fetched to check for updates so the cost isn't paid just once.

It is paid only once since that 10 MiB gets cached by the reader. In future fetches the reader asks for entries newer than the date it last checked which means that the items already requested won't be sent again.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#74

Post by politelemon »

ramijames wrote: post #37
zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

Firefox dropped RSS/Atom support too

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#75

Post by Hamuko »

rambambram wrote: post #66
bastawhiz wrote: post #54

>> 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.

I also chuckled. The orange does something extra for visibility, but I can't stand that color (even though I'm Dutch). The 'Wifi icon on it's side' is enough for me.

Yeah, I don't like the colour either. I also can't really justify adding an orange logo on my site when it's almost entirely in black and white otherwise.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#76

Post by mdp2021 »

zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

That some corporate services stopped existing does not imply one cannot have an "application/rss+xml" link in the html page source - in fact, it is not normal to depend on perishable services when "unrevokable" desktop software applications can be available, and in the case of RSS readers there still exists a large number (and writing one is pretty trivial).

To discover a feed, just check the html source. The problem is when the feed exists but it is not mentioned at all in the website.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#77

Post by mdp2021 »

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.

RSS is there to inform you of new content being released - it is a "push" notification.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#79

Post by mdp2021 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #9

are there any guides on how to do RSS correctly? I just dump all of our blog content in there (250 posts) and it's a lot of content haha. I don't know how you're supposed to set it up and there are so few guides on it

RSS works in the framework of users periodically checking for new content (maybe daily, maybe weekly...): you have to decide a window that has the users receive a reasonable number of new and old posts.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#80

Post by orbital-decay »

zlg_codes wrote: post #31

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

Native RSS support never made sense as a core feature for browsers in the first place; extensions are much better suited for this. There are plenty of replacements for Google Reader as well, which also provide much more than just RSS.

In the media optimized for engagement/addiction, RSS provides a step off the platform, so of course they don't use it. Even many personal blogs the article mostly talks about might want to keep the reader on the site for clicks.

It's a conflict of interest between content providers and consumers (mostly advertisement). It's not an implementation issue.

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