Earlier quoted context omitted.
I usually just check the power company's outage map.
Usually takes them sometime to update it, never fast enough.
It must depend on the power company. This one has it almost immediately.
RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#82I like RSS and use it daily, however the main drawback is a lot of sites tend to truncate their articles and have a "read more" link. Not so useful when you're in an offline environment like the London underground (where I usually catch up with my feeds at the end of the day) Facebook and Twitter suffer from the same issue though
Most UK phone networks let you use the free Virgin WiFi in the underground now.
I'm on GiffGaff which isn't one of those networks supported.
Additionally I think the rigamarole of getting to the station, connecting to the wifi, swiping back to the article you couldn't read, downloading it etc is a real pain!
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#83I use Google news with a custom filter for stuff about China. Just click on the bookmark once every morning. Don't get much noise, but sometimes hit paywalls.
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#84Indeed. But Facebook and Twitter beat RSS for tracking users. edit: > Perhaps most importantly, you don’t need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don’t miss anything. That's misleading. If you are using a desktop client then you might miss items from a very active feed if it didn't connect to the web recently enough. That was (to me) the biggest selling point of Google Reade…
I don't understand your comparison. The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app? But every other webbased reader had the same advantage, and since Google Reader's demise, we got an explosion of amazing readers, from free over self-hosted to paid.
what I liked about Google reader was that I could subscribe to friends feeds, curated by what they decided what was worthwhile to share (from their own rss feeds, mostly comp.sci stuff).
and most importantly, that it did just that (if unasked) without getting all Facebooky, playing mind games etc to draw you into more "social" "engagement".
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most UK phone networks let you use the free Virgin WiFi in the underground now.
I'm on GiffGaff which isn't one of those networks supported. Additionally I think the rigamarole of getting to the station, connecting to the wifi, swiping back to the article you couldn't read, downloading it etc is a real pain!
Giffgaff most certainly is supported (it uses O2's network). Some people report having to temporarily install the O2 app for a one-off registration.
It's no worse whether you're at the station or not, unless I've missed the point of what you wrote.
It's better if you can grab the whole article for offline use, though; back when I used RSS a lot - post Google Reader - I used an Android app which could get the whole article. But I've stopped just about all internet time-wasting except to main news headlines and HN, preferring to read books on a kindle.
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#86The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed. FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences…
FB sure, as they have made it harder and harder to flip the feed to chronological. But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making, not Twitter's.
Is it possible to set Twitter (not a third party client) to show you all unread items- that is, to give you a gap-free view of your feed? Or is it still just "whatever was most recent, mostly"?
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#87I am not the developer behind it, but I want to advertise it: http://fetchrss.com/ is awesome. I can fetch stuff from public Facebook pages I need (without having a fb account) and create a RSS feed of them. Then with ifttt.com I send updates to my mailbox: awesome. Also, fuck Facebook and long live RSS and the open web.
Hmm... this looks really interesting. Gonna' try this with a few reddit links (/r/sub1+sub2...) to see how it handles that. For some reason my current reader is now having problems.
You realize, of course, that Reddit has a native option [0] for RSS right?
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathog...
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#88I was okay with social-curated news when my social feeds were chronological, but now that everyone's doing algorithms, you miss way too much if you aren't looking at something like RSS. Personally, I use TinyTinyRSS on Sandstorm.io. There's a fantastic TTRSS client available for Windows UWP that works on Windows Mobile too.
I like TinyTinyRSS, but I wish there was a better web-client for it. The default one is way to slow and bloated. I'd still recommend using it though.
Definitely not a fan of the web client. In my case, I lucked out, the TTRSS app I use on my Windows Mobile phone was universal... It's excellent on desktop too. I never use the web interface.
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#89The idea that you get news from FB and Twitter is fundamentally flawed. FB/Twitter are known to have algorithms designed to show you things that you will like (because people stop using Twitter/FB if they see stuff that makes them unhappy). While newspapers have this to a certain extent (all those "Drink 2 glasses of wine a day to live longer" articles) since they aren't targeted based on your individual preferences…
FB sure, as they have made it harder and harder to flip the feed to chronological. But Twitter? I know they insert this whole "in case you missed" but most of the feed is still chronological. A very different problem is with having overly prolific retweeters in your feed, but that is a problem of your making, not Twitter's.
I don't believe Twitter is doing as much algorithmic targeting as Facebook is for sure, but I believe the likelihood of that changing is very high. They need to justify that $13bn market cap.
Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News
#90The problem with RSS is that most feeds treat all items the same so the same prominence is attached to a nuclear strike on New York as is attached to a child scraping its knee.
While major news outlets pretty much always have separate feeds for different categories the real awesomeness of RSS was pretty much not understood:
There is the element!
I aggregate many many thousands of feeds, I've never seen anyone use the category properly. I actually cant find any attempt at a specification that clearly describes it. (I might be confused by the versions and feeds using a mix of elements from different versions)
You know things are bad when w3schools[1] is the only one providing a full description of the difference between non hierarchic and hierarchic. On the domain attribute they are as stupid as everyone else. I'm not even sure how the domain attribute should be used. I do instinctively know that putting domain="syndic8" is wrong as it is not a domain. That however isn't stopping everyone from using it as an example in their version of the spec.
Anyway:
The element specifies one or more categories the channel or item belongs to separated by commas. The element can ALSO specify the hierarchic location in a category. The value of the element is then a forward-slash separated string.
So you could entirely have something totally like:
local/traffic acidents,injury,children
Where "local > traffic" is the hierarchy while "injury" and "children" are more like tags.
On the rare occasion I see a element in an RSS feed they 99% of the time use "General". Using separate feeds to accomplish the same(?) is not great but it works.
Here is an OPML I bake myself for the guardian.[2] Their feeds do actually use categories complete with domains. Lots of them![3] Don't ask me how to consume this feedstock.
To me the weirdness of the lack of category is primarily in every properly structured site having them. If you are pulling the title, pubdate and content from your database it shouldn't take much effort to also pull the category and have a pokemon element in the news item.
Fun fact:
While it is missing from the w3 validator spec[4] the harvard.edu version of the spec[5] does mention the historic awesome "ratings" element. A thing from back in the days when non-corporate technology was still a thing. Namely The PICS rating system[6].
This hidden treasure was pretty much hated to death by loud mouth corporate propagandists. (I'm putting it mildly) The public rating your article is the worse kind of scrutiny when working for a mainstream propaganda outlet portraying it self as if news. The status quo eventually nailed the coffin shut by promoting it as a parental-oversight adult content filter which became the only surviving implementation.
Sadly the RSS spec only allows rating the channel rather than its items which spoils most of the theoretical awesome. :(
Thus therefore as the implication thereof, at least in theory, RSS has the most awesome tagging, categorization, rating and review system ever envisioned (not-seen) on the internet.
People just don't know how to technology.
[1] - https://www.w3schools.com/XML/rss_tag_category_channel.asp
[2] - http://opml.go-here.nl/theguardian.opml
[3] - view-source:https://www.theguardian.com/business/vodafonegroup/rss
[4] - https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#hrelementsOfLti...
[5] - https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#optionalChannelElemen...
[6] - https://www.w3.org/PICS/