Hacker News Reader

Comment by O1111OOO | Hacker News Reader

RSS is dead...

I have a local html page devoted to news. An entry for a specific site will see at least two urls: The main site's URL and a link to it's RSS feed.

Linking to the feed directly was a great way to bypass all the modern garbage on the home page to see a simple list of articles (not unlike HN's home page). It's borked now...

None of my RSS links render. Chromium was very bad at this but at least it rendered a few (a couple of examples below), FF64 doesn't render any (in any form):

http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index

https://feeds.feedburner.com/ItsFoss

A huge part of my ability to enjoy the web has just been destroyed.:( I'll have to test this on other browsers...

edit (update): both sample links above are working now (odd). Most others with XML, RSS, Atom extensions do not render (FF offers to open in external app or save).

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Why not use a feed reader which is designed and optimized for that task? I like Newsblur.com (aka https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur) but there are tons of great desktop apps which do a much better job than Firefox ever did.

Another vote for newsblur. I plan to self-host, but until I do, Sam hosts it for me. (... and I'll keep playing for premium even when I do self host, because shiloh needs to eat too :)

Completely agree - use a feed reader. I was a Newsblur subscriber and have great respect for the product and Samuel.

Recently switched to Miniflux: https://miniflux.app which is much better for my needs. Small efficient Go app that works great with a PWA on mobile.

Another vote for NewsBlur here too. I’ve been a paying member since Google Reader left us. It’s been absolutely fantastic.

Just giving a shout-out to my favourite: Feedbin https://feedbin.com/

I know it is not what you've been doing but it may be something you'd like to consider. I also love RSS and even though there are many add-ons to use in Firefox to restore that kind of functionality, I prefer to use Thunderbird to consume RSS/Atom feeds, I've posted about it at:

http://andregarzia.com/2018/11/reading-blogs-with-thunderbir...

Since Thunderbird is also my email client, it becomes a very pleasant experience of catching my email, my newsletters and my blogs in the same client.

Appreciate the suggestion:)

I actually use The Old Reader[0] for most tech sites (including hnFrontPage and showHN). There are other sites that I'm only partially interested in or they have so much content, I don't want them in my Reader.

When I have time, I'll access the Feed Link and give the stories a bird's eye view. Also, some of these home pages are a nightmare in the Times Square sense of the word.

The Old Reader also keeps the the Feed Link accessible. Sometimes I'll hit the [mark all as read] but later on, I might go back and look at the day's listings for a particular site. I'm surprised how often I do this for some sites (mostly to reread an article or follow up on a comment I made). That flexibility is lost now.

Also, I don't subscribe to general news sites. The amount of articles would be overwhelming. News sites with RSS Feed Links make them manageable. I've essentially lost this - so I'll either have to access their obnoxious home pages (with anti-trackers fully loaded) or find other means.

I used to go local on my feeds... and while I avoid the cloud for most things, feed listings feel very natural there (also they don't take up local storage).

It's workable but I'm a bit annoyed that an application built on rendering (simple) tags (rq'd little/zero work to maintain) decides that things associated with RSS are going to be killed off (maybe??... in favor of their own news sources - which require much more work to maintain).

[0] https://theoldreader.com/

I'm on Nightly 66.0a1 and both those links work fine. Maybe they fixed it in a more recent version?

I believe that the FF RSS reader is still available via extension. I am not 100% certain but I seem to recall hearing that in a podcast which covered the pending demise of standard RSS support in FF.

I just use a native app.

You can still do that with an extension.

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