Two words: News. Blur. I have been using https://newsblur.com for years now (ever since Google Reader died) and am not switching to anything else soon.
RSS is not dead.
Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
81–90 of 303 posts
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#82I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite. TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem. One of the…
100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome.
Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional.
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#83It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to share content. Just the opposite in fact.
Nearly every site I visit on a regular basis, HN, Reddit, YouTube, has RSS feeds. Granted, they're link only feeds, but that's far better than having to create an account just to get an inferior "subscription" experience or having to re-scan over things I've already read and ignored.
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#84Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for packaging their Linux app.
Why it is sad?
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#85Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default. Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so: http://example.com/?feed=rss2
Medium has them too [0]: medium.com/feed/@Medium
Plus Blogger [1]: blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
[0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed...
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
For reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a kindle book. Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all po…
For your RSS issue, you can safely truncate your RSS feed to the latest N articles, where N is a random reasonable number you choose (10 is good, because it's so decimal). RSS reader software will know how to deal with it. WRT scraping, it is getting harder because funny websites w/ no static content where everything is generated via Angular or Perpendicular or sth. are really hard to deal with. Recently my uni switc…
> For your RSS issue, you can safely truncate your RSS feed to the latest N articles, where N is a random reasonable number you choose (10 is good, because it's so decimal). RSS reader software will know how to deal with it.
But people who don't use the right aggregators will not be able to read past 10 posts. And if everyone was using aggregators, I wouldn't have such a high bandwidth bill.
> WRT scraping, it is getting harder because funny websites w/ no static content.
But sites that can have an RSS feed necessarily need to deliver their content in a static form. What surprises me is that we don't have a tool for even those cases.
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#87> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way…
That's because rendering JS/CSS/whatever has become the norm. It has become the norm for two reasons: tooling for building "static" sites with this technology has gotten very popular and well-done, and sites with a vested (advertising/lockin) interest in showing their content "their way" have jumped on board.
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean the fact that aggregators like The Old Reader just download the RSS file from the website periodically, and then serve up cached copies to their many user? True, although this is another way of saying that some of the value added by aggregators only exists by virtue of the terrible design of RSS.
It might be construed as a feature, since a blog can consist of simply static files, no need for running any code relating to RSS.
It doesn't need code. Just a static text file with a list of publication dates and URLs, each of which points to static HTML file for each publicly available posts. Then each user could check the list and download only what's new, without needing an aggregator. Users would never need to download the same content twice.
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#89Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?
It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0].
[0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS
#90Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?
They're interchangeable; any significant RSS reader is also an Atom reader.