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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major sites like YouTube.

If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it via RSS.

I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore.

Basically, there is gold out there.

Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.

There is still the option to make your own client or just buy something like Tweetbot which has no ads.

But I hear you. I find Twitter unusable without 3rd party client, and I think that is affecting my experience in an indirect way as well. I think the fact most people see ML picked tweets has caused fewer people responding to what I share now versus 4 years back.

I wrote a simple Twitter API to RSS script and have been using that to read Twitter (via Feedly) for a few years now. The downside is that you don't get tweets at anything even approaching real time (Feedly seems to hit my RSS once every 6 hours), but I find it just perfect for low volume Twitter feeds (like bands announcing new releases or shows).

And for the ones that don't, there is third party services that can monitor a site for changes and create a custom RSS feed from that.

Don't forget to just ask! I usually include a minimal RSS feed example in the email along with some bare basics explaintion. Works surprisingly well. Webmasters care?!

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<title>itakedrugs</title>

<description>The takings of drugs</description>

<item>

<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.</description>

</item>

<item>

<title>Coffeeee</title>

<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.</description>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

Its just a text file. You can have as many items as you like, all parts speak for themselves except perhaps the time stamp[0]

The pubDate is optional but a lot of rss aggregators don't know what to do without it.

[0] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3339

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