Hacker News Reader

Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Random question, how many people still use RSS? Just out of curiosity.

EDIT: And while I'm at it, are his/er packages what one usually uses in common lisp for web development?

I use Feedly and IFTT to pipe my feed of 150 or so lists straight into a dedicated Slack channel for monitoring new articles coming out on InfoSec. It's pretty convenient, but also not too intrusive as if you need to switch off, you can just mute the dedicated Slack channel for a bit.

I follow around 200 feeds on Feedly. It is pretty much my sole source of business and personal interest news, because I can consume it all using a single app (Reeder) in a very effective way.

That's a ton of feeds. Don't you end up with thousands of unread articles every day? And how do you sift through all of them to find the most relevant / important news? When I open nytimes.com I see the top story right there on the front page. When I open Reeder, I see an enormous list of articles sorted in reverse chronological order.

I get around 1500 articles a day, yes, but following feeds doesn't mean you need to actually _read_ it all :)

I simply scan through the headlines. Typically business news is repetitive enough that you can get a good feel for how "hot" a topic is, and then I just read one or two pieces on it (usually from the "best" writers) and discard the other 50.

Even headline-only feeds are useful in that regard - they're just signal boosters.

On the other hand, I tend to read a fair number of personal/tech blog posts in their entirety - around 20 a day, over breakfast.

This is absolutely the best feature of RSS for me. Rather than have to open a browser, discover the quirks of its navigation and then page backwards and forwards through articles. RSS gives a sane way to skim through those things and focus on the interesting parts.

Plus keeping up with podcasts which tend to be published less often than articles.

RSS makes it easier to shuffle through the headlines.

Using Feedbin and Reader but only check feeds over the weekend when I can spend time reading and sorting.

One thing on this approach: you are screwed if the website isn't using well structured HTML. Having to write rules for individual websites will become cumbersome and will break if they decide to change their markup.

I keep track of a few websites off the command line by doing a checksum of the HTML page and then doing a diff. It doesn't work if the HTML includes a timestamp but it does work for the websites that I am watching.

many? here's a thread from last night with dozens of comments about rss readers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12932429

I use RSS everywhere I can. It allows me to build a central source for everything I'm interested in.

Quicklisp is par for the course with Common Lisp nowadays, and the dependencies all look fairly normal to me.

If you were going for production code, I'd throw Huchentoot behind Nginx.

> EDIT: And while I'm at it, are his/er packages what one usually uses in common lisp for web development?

No - but there are no packages one "usually uses in common lisp for web development". There are choices for every aspect and one is expected to make an informed decision or simply write yet another implementation of the same functionality if preferable in the specific project.

Of the packages mentioned I only use cl-who regularly; I have a modified hunchentoot for dev work and my own css generator. Using a package for handling ajax requests never occurred to me because for all my projects a 5 line macro did the job.

I go with 211 feeds in a desktop app. It allows me to group news and take a quick look from a lot of sources. I don't follow news orgs that don't use RSS.

I find it really valuable, and follow a few dozen sites.

I'm curious, if folks don't use an RSS reader, how do they find articles and follow sites they're interested in?

Twitter / Facebook / Reddit

For infrequently updated websites at aren't very popular (so their new articles wouldn't show up on your Facebook or Twitter feeds), I don't think there are good alternatives to RSS: I guess you can stop reading them or remember to visit them every now and then.

Certainly the stop-reading-those-websites option is easier to setup than an RSS reader. Maybe that's the "solution" most people adopt?

I use rss2email. Have it running as a nightly cronjob on my raspberry pi.

Big time RSS user. NetNewsWire under OSX and IOS with cloud sync. Means I'm able to punch through local news, world news, sub-Reddits, tech news, blogs etc in around 15-20 minutes a day - usually when I'm perched on the porcelain.

Although that added efficiency just means I trawl HN for longer...

I use Digg RSS Reader with hundreds of feeds. It became my only go to place after I abandoned social media.

I have been running my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS (with ~30 feeds) for years and couldn't be happier. Migrated from Feedly because of their usability and annoying upgrade reminders.

I do, using a native client.

at EDIT: I don't care as long as it does the job. There's Caveman2 for a full-features web stack but I thought it was overkill. After all, the web UI is - more or less - an "add-on". :-)

"...how many people still use RSS?"

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