Please, expose your RSS
rknight.me
Please, expose your RSS
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#2RSS 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 a market for this kind of stuff. People can sell data, including articles, as data source for people's ML pipelines. It's a possible path we can detox from ads.
So yes, please start with making RSS better! It's a beacon of light in a sea of darkness.
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#3I use miniflux and if im looking for a feed I just toss in the domain. 3 out of 4 times it find something at /rss, feed, or something else.
Would be great if it was exposed. I presume it’s not because it’s baked into frameworks and comes along for free, but maybe that’s naive.
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#4One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product exposes, the only supporting clients of this faux protocol are NewsBlur, Feedly, Feedbin, and inoreader.
[^1]: ht to Darek Kay's blog post, https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/, for alerting me to this fact!
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#5RSS 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…
> I suspect with the advent of LLM, there's finally a market for this kind of stuff. People can sell data, including articles, as data source for people's ML pipelines.
You mean RSS will improve copyright laundering?
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#6RSS 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.
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#7One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product expose…
This is also common for podcast clients with server-side crawling, which is basically all of them.
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#8RSS 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…
I don't think RSS needs to "improve" for the benefit of scrapers.
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#9are 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
Re: Please, expose your RSS
#10RSS 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…
I've built an opinionated RSS reader/tracker that was built around this - It works with links only. This way, you have consistent experience, and the author gets visits to his website.
You can give it a go here: https://lenns.io. I'd be happy to get some feedback. Thanks.