Please Add RSS Support to Your Site
kevq.uk
kevq.uk
It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then.
In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see it return.
Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was RSS[0].
We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/
I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the same.
Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.
Taking something that works out of your product doesnt ever make people happy, and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.
Its a "well that's ok that we wont take this on anymore and let those users manage their own problem" use case.
Of course scope creep adds a burden. It's one more thing Mozilla developers have to tend to.
I assume you work in tech, maybe even as a developer. So you know full well that every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.
> and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.
It absolutely is, if it makes those features better and gives them a focused place to develop outside of the core browser.
If you're so upset about it literally go and press one big blue "Add to firefox" button and have all the previous features, and more, back in under 10 seconds.
Mozilla's manifesto is just marketing now — it's obvious they don't really believe it any more.
And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of any relevance at all.
> Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. [...] every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.
And the same holds true for Pocket.
Pocket is used by people and is a feature Mozilla want to prominently integrate with Firefox. This is due to the financial gains they directly get when someone signs up for Pocket premium.
It's not an unused, dusty feature that's adding a burden to the platform and is a net time + money sink. It's something that makes them money.
As I said, in the comment you just replied to, even if nobody did use pocket then this would be a burden they are willing to take. So, comparing RSS feeds to pocket on the fact that it can be implemented as an extension alone is a nonsensical point.
You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure.
IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.
Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one.
Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems.
The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.
Further the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensions
And finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement.
Waterfox preserves Live Bookmarks, doesn't do telemetry, was unaffected by expired certificate killing all addons (my FF mobile was affected so I basically had no mobile browser for a few days), among other reasons.
I know after a while I will be forced back to Chromified Firefox when development of Waterfox comes to an end, but at least for now, I can stretch out the moment of a non-Googly browser + Live Bookmarks a few more months or years like whats-her-name in Doctor Strange.
I'm now on Netnewswire 5: https://nnw.ranchero.com/ and write a blog: http://jakeseliger.com that includes a lot of link posts. I still use RSS for all the original reasons, even if most of my friends look puzzled by the acronym "RSS." RSS still solves the "too many sites, too little time" problem extremely well, especially for occasionally updated blogs.
Just for the record, each mastodon-user has its own RSS-feed: https://INSTANCE/@USER.rss
I'm a happy user of Miniflux (hosted myself), but there are many alternatives. https://miniflux.app/
I'm reminded about how some RSS readers support converting email newsletters to a feed.
More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.
If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.
FWIW, there are very few companies who go to as much lengths as Mozilla to optimize for user privacy in their approach to telemetry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/testing-privacy-preserving...
Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time.
However, I think push is way overused. Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Online chats, maybe some of them. CNN publishing "breaking news" that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks.
I'd much rather have the latter class of "notifications" batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption.
RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with "harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing" as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically.
They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. Publishers have wanted this since the dawn of personal computing, because their ultimate dream is to push advertising into your eyeballs without your explicit grant of permission.
Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them. (Truth be told it has never been a priority, they have always focused on "empowering developers," which really means empowering the publishers that those developers work for.) With phones and garbage like the ads in the Windows 10 Start menu, they finally achieved their dream and we're living in their dystopia today.
Safari has a preference for "allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications" (you can also set it on a per-site basis.) iOS is scrupulous about requiring permission for notifications and allows you to configure their annoyingness (plus current iOS asks you if you still want notifications for particularly busy senders.)
> Truth be told it has never been a priority
I mean, it seems to be a priority for Apple in Safari and iOS.
I think the web platform has a long way to go however -- considering what a low quality experience surfing the web can often be these days, it may already be too far gone.
<a rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss.xml">RSS</a>
You can also use a meta tag instead if you'd prefer not to display a link. More information can be found over MDN[0] and I also created a blog post on the 5 most important things all blogs should do.[1]
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
[1]https://michaelbrooks.co.uk/5-important-things-i-learnt-when...
1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1.
2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole.
3. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1.
As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days.
^1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
I prefer content embedded in my reader, but I don’t mind clicking through if it helps the author. Though, in my case I doubt it will since I’m blocking any kind of trackers, which includes many ads.
My problem isn't a business issue - it's that I find news feeds chaotic and want to read blogs directly - with their design and layout, focusing on the writer directly, rather than amid a pile of distractions. (To me, even Google Reader had that problem.) But I think it's cool that our separate concerns are both answered if RSS is used for notification rather than for syndication. RSS notifies my reader tool and then I can see an overview of what's happening out there when I make time to read.
I don't think we've quite explored the possibilities that RSS opened for us.
Tangent but: Does google have any official way to combat this?
It seems like an easy enough problem to solve. As the content-creator, you could submit your content first to some kind of registry, so that google could identify you as the true author. Does anything like this exist? If not, why not?
Could you elaborate how you measured that?
While Google trends depicts decline in search frequency so it may correlate with actual usage, it could as well mean that the "RSS market" is stable and saturated ("everybody know about it, so no need to search for it").
If you came to this conclusion while looking at your access logs, keep in mind that single request from some web-based reader could "feed" hordes of subscribers. In scenario desktop RSS readers were completely abandoned and everybody used web-based RSS reading services, there would be just ~ services count × their check frequency requests, from which it would be really hard to abstract subscriber count, I guess.
Maybe there is exact way to determine this usage I'm not aware of? Are those services telling back subscribers count in their requests? Or do they publish this information in some standardized way? I really would like to know…
I'd be surprised if this has completely atrophied away.
How do you meaure this? Since so many people uses online reader, it is very likely that one single request made to your server is in fact some online aggregator which may redistribute it to an unknown amount of readers...
Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article.
I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow.
A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS feed for my client to subscribe to.
I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal implications of it
My crisis of conscience was around storing the full text of the articles on my own server and then presenting them as a new feed on my domain, e.g. https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml
Everything in the feed is that gets generated is exactly the same as the original feed (canonical link to the actual article, publsh date, author etc) the only difference was the text in the body of each entry.
As a personal tool you built for yourself and your friend(s) nerdy enough to understand it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as no search engines index your site and no one finds out about it.
Source code of a slightly older version available at: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
Its a cop out that I still feel bad about. Maybe I will fix it sometime.
If it makes you feel better, you can run your extractor against sheep.horse as much as you want.
Can I just spit the raw HTML at you? Do I need to inline images? I'm assuming that someone who's consuming a full feed isn't going to want any CSS included.
I'm not against this, but I'm also hand-coding all of my blogs, and this seems like a problem that would be more easily and more consistently solved by a user-run service like the one you've made. I don't know what readers currently support, and I'm looking around quickly on DuckDuckGo and not seeing many resources about generating full-text feeds that don't boil down to, "click the button in Wordpress."
Again, I have no problem supporting this, but if I'm going to put the time in to change my blogs, I kind of need more prodding than just one or two people saying it annoys them. I don't have any specific reason I wouldn't want to accommodate people like you -- I'm not advertising on my blogs and I don't have any analytics, so I don't care where you read. But I don't want to invest a lot of time into building a completely new content pipeline.
Also look at other pages’ rss feeds that include full articles.
Perhaps you should, I enjoyed finding stuff like this : https://danshumway.com/blog/gamasutra-vulnerabilities/
I realize that there are some ways that people serve ads where they vet them and make sure they're not tracking readers. But even if it was easy to set something like that up, I wouldn't feel good running sponsored content or ads on my platforms -- it's not the relationship I want to have with my readers.
I take a much more negative view of ads than most other people I know. I don't just dislike ads that track users or that are poorly vetted. I dislike the psychological effect that ads have on people, I dislike the attention that they take, and I am very cautious of monetization schemes that are too closely integrated into the consumption of content. I can't think of a way I could run ads that wouldn't make reading my blog a worse experience.
I know that's a somewhat extreme position to take. But it's not that advertising is inherently evil, it's just that it has more consequences and costs than most people realize. It's not only about privacy, security, or money.
Given how large the current advertising industry is, where possible I try to block it and harm it indiscriminately. I encourage people to block ads even on websites that they would otherwise support. I think it would be good for society if the advertising industry got a lot smaller, even if that makes funding online content harder.
Suggest you include the posting date on that page, as reading it, I wasn't sure how recent the info was. I was then shocked to find that these vulnerabilities were identified late last year. Some of these are security 101!
This is off-topic at this point, but I still stand by the ending to that post -- Gamasutra did reach out to me and did work with me for a little while to fix some of the issues, but eventually communication fell off.
I didn't re-check to validate that the issues were fixed because I felt like I had done everything that could be expected of me at that point and because, honestly, the whole thing was really stressful. Even when companies are being nice (and UBM was really nice about the whole thing), public disclosure is still scary. You just hear horror stories.
I still recommend that people be cautious using Gamasutra. I only wrote up specific vulnerabilities that I found accidentally, I didn't pen-test the site. My point with this article was that the site needs to be pen-tested. As far as I know, that's never happened.
I guess the main thing you need to provide really is the text and images, <p>, <strong>, <img> tags etc. If you look at your site in Reader View in Firefox or Safari and it looks OK - that should be good enough
The free version has some limitations, like only three articles per rss feed. They offer a self-hosted version for a one-time 35euro fee (although software updates only for one year), which I really appreciate.
Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website.
You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url.
On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use.
If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fun...
https://www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/premiumbombcast?api_ke... (you just copy it from the RSS button on their site)
(previously it was https://username:password@www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/prem...)
Seems to work across most apps. I don't see why it would be that hard to build a standard around something similar.
[1] primarily ad-free versions of their main podcasts, but they also have premium-exclusive podcasts
Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources. Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw, is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp.
And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too.
Some blogs choose not to expose RSS feeds of course, but they do so at their own loss. This is because some people are not interested in expanding their audience, they just want to publish some stuff from time to time. And that's totally fine.
> Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
An RSS feed can include just summaries that redirect users to your website. And I actually prefer summaries because I don't want to mess with CSS stuff.
Of course you can monetize it, from where did you get the impression that you can't?
I personally know that a lot of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to I also end up sharing articles with friends. I see these articles early and quick and help create early discussion about them and comment early on them often first. I feel like overall RSS feed users may not directly look hugely beneficial to a site, but can have other impacts hard to track.
Tell that to Stitcher. They have paid Stitcher Premium podcasts that you can only play in their (terrible) app. A third party developer ended up creating "Unofficial RSS Feeds" for them, but who knows how long that will last.
High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.
If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.
The King(s) of Google do have a strong blogging community in Blogger, but it was never supposed to be, nor never will be, a backstop against Facebook. It would be better for Google to work within Facebook on this, as bloggers in WordPRess, or MEdium, or whatever announce on social media, guess whose ads are running on the blogs? And I myself as a dev, I'm still searching for the best articles for development practices and more. They don't see that need for us to subscribe to RSS. It's the King(s) of Facebook, Twitter, etc., that need to listen. Giving us a way to watch our subscribed RSS feeds in their own ecosystem will give them the edge on content aggregation.
As far as difficulty in monetizing, John Gruber has been making quite a bit of money for years selling one RSS entry at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week.
Bloomberg is one of the largest new sites; a top 1000 global site and top 200 US site by traffic. It has no RSS feeds.
A little difficult to parse some of the results, but they're there.
I also subscribe to email newsletters that have sponsored links/blurbs in their content, and I'm sure that one could monetize RSS content similarly.
I feel like Randall Munroe is doing well for himself. The math is probably different for smaller players.
I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.
All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news and other info.
When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly seems to be the most popular).
I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds, which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”).
In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.
After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.
Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self hosted users towards those social media.
An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped on the Slack bandwagon.
I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point, GR did overtake the market of RSS clients.
Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of affairs.
I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.
Some of them don't have RSS feeds.
But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed.
Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but any one will do.
Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional.
And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the <head> of all your pages, like:
<link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml">
[2] https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml
In any case, I sent him an email with info on how to add it.
{{ with .OutputFormats.Get "rss" -}}
{{ printf `<link rel="%s" type="%s" href="%s" title="%s" />` .Rel .MediaType.Type .Permalink $.Site.Title | safeHTML }}
{{ end -}}
RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling.
Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t have is an ITunes style directory.
I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and discover so the open web can flourish.
Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for commercial applications).
Feedback always welcome!
Feed Reader https://pine.blog
Feed Directory https://pine.blog/search
Or by using Atom instead of RSS!
Atom is very well supported too. Actually, we sometimes say "RSS" to refer to a feed whenever it is RSS or Atom.
Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web browser?
I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I tried.
As individuals, we used to look at all content ingested by readers (programs or Google Reader/feedly) and ourselves cherry-pick the articles, posts we wanted to see. Like an old newsgroup reader. Gradually that function has moved into programming beyond your control showing you suggested content filtered via models that show you only what they think you want to see. Buzzword: AI. Roll your eyes.
Some sites would provide a teaser, others full content, some would put an advertiser's message in the body and a catchy title. It was up to the content maker. Typically there'd always be some reduction in the actual markup/content itself. Interesting things you really liked you might have clicked into and seen on the original site for a full experience, fed those people's ads and analytics. But the bottom line is it all largely interworked.
One of my favorite things was using iGoogle or netvibes because those two flagships took RSS widgets. Using either custom programming or something like Yahoo Pipes you could cobble together something useful. Like make your own google homepage or dashboard containing both your calendar appointments, filtered gmail, and quirky things like server uptimes, alerts, API usage limits widgets, fun webcomics.
From a publisher's perspective, RSS is still used to connect disparate publishing systems together since it's a standard. From one content management system you can pipe material to a blog widget, to a mobile app endpoint, to a partner site, to an affiliate. Direct site hosting is down but even now we use RSS to feed media partners like Facebook instant, Google News producer, Google News on [Voice] Assistant, twitter (via publish vendor), Apple podcasts (actually that might be JSON, but maybe wasn't always?), etc.
As far as what gets pushed to the rss feeds is entirely up to the particular website. Some are generous and provide full content and images, and others are fickle and make you click the headline and view the article on their site.
I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow set of HTML allowed in the <description> tag, I don't have anything in there and just have a link to my site.
There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.
One of my favorite webcomics updated very sporadically and didn't provide a RSS feed for the longest time; it was difficult to keep up with updates. The current feed is just a link to the comic and is a significant improvement.
The author was resistant to RSS for the longest time because they thought they _had_ to include the comic in the feed and was worried about losing ad revenue.
Yes it isn't the hottest thing in the tech world today, but it doesn't have to be.
I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from the home URL.
Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no reference to it. If I didn’t think it odd that the author wasn’t providing a feed, I wouldn’t have found it.
Blog platforms tend to provide support for RSS feeds because blog platforms are built by people who care about such things, so even if the writer doesn’t care, the feed will be there. I’m more worried about the lack of RSS support in big popular platforms that have no reason to not provide one, such as the News page on the Epic Games Store[3].
[1]: It may be that some were auto-generated and provided wrong info; I didn’t verify them in depth.
Like you said, he missed a lot of them, and isn't linking to his own feed properly on his site so that RSS readers can find it (with rel="alternate" and/or type="application/rss+xml").
- they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was in its heyday and don't know what it is.
- sites operators want to human users to interact with their site specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing) in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been commoditized and aggregated.
Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself.
But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has the condensed info right there.
The CII Best Practices badge has a "projects" page that lists all projects working on or achieving a badge: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects . You'll notice an RSS symbol; if you click on it, you'll be led to https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed (in your preferred language) that will show you projects listed in reverse-latest-edit order (so you can see who's made the latest changes to their badge info).
Once you start thinking of RSS as a way to tell people "what's new" in a simple common format, there are lots of interesting uses for it.
For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my service.
I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam, github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my inbox.
There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own domain to avoid being locked in to my service.
If it's relevant - and I mean, it actually adds to the discussion, and not just matches the keywords for which you try to adveritse it - then it's fine to mention your service. We're all interested in discovering new stuff here.
/s
Every now and again I have to fight Amazon to let me open a link in Safari instead of the Amazon app. Generally it's because I cannot purchase the item inside of the app (digital content like movies and Kindle books), but they still automatically open the app and make me do a dance to get it in Safari. Same thing with Yelp, under no circumstances am I ever able to get a Yelp link to open on their website. YouTube does the same thing, and I've had Gmail do it a few times too.
It's one thing to show a banner at the top letting me know you have an app. But I never want to be directed from Safari into an app. If I wanted to use the app, I'd have opened the app. Since I'm in Safari, it means I want to use the web site.
Also, I much rather go to the Youtube site on mobile than use the app.
I've never advertised any of my rss feeds, I just leave them up at <domain>/rss.xml. I was under the impression that RSS feed locations were mostly standardized, but I'm noticing that the feed location for this blog is at a different URL.
See this section and the one below it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.
It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn and mikebabb. Neither has much content.
Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement?
IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality, development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.
Atom is technically superior to RSS, most concretely in how it specifies the format of fields like title and content, whether they’re plain text or HTML. This means that I can use things like <em> and <code> in my blog post titles and have it work (clients will either display the HTML unaltered, sanitise it, or strip tags, leaving the correct text), and have blog post titles with text like <_>::v::<_> (real example!) not get mangled horrifically.
I do not recommend that anything use RSS now.
I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.
> If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.
Assuming RSS continues to decline, I imagine that more and more sites will stop supporting it.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss
Disclaimer: Googler if it matters. All opinions are my own.
And if you're searching for trends only, you'll be able to find that it's already happening. Community discovered that social networks is not an answer, the content is mostly garbage in there and nobody wants to 'scroll to infinity' anymore.
Look at Lisp trends at different time periods in the past 60 or so years. And then at Clojure or functional programming in general now.
Re: 'googler' - no it doesn't matter. Just because you're 'googler', doesn't mean that you're right.
Lets revise this in 10 years. My bet is: if not RSS, then better RSS ;)
Didn't win the competition, but expanded it over a few years and kept using it as my main blog until it fell aside when I went to university.
But unfortunately since the death of Google Reader, RSS hasn't found a way back into my life.
Works perfectly fine.
NetNewsWire 5 just released for MacOS. I believe it's also coming to iOS eventually.
It can pipe article links and text through other programs. I can pipe YouTube videos to youtube-dl, article text through pandoc and w3m, podcast files through podboat (newsboat's sister podcasting program), and links through a bookmarking program. You can also pipe article text through something like urlview to select links by pressing a key. I can also reload each of my 200+ feeds in a different thread to speed things up.
When it isn't - subway rides, long commutes passing through areas with weak signals - i just listen to podcasts instead of the frustration of reading an article and not being able to search anything instantly.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.mvilla.andr...
Separately, I really like JSONFeed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed. It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on more.
1. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so they make money from ads.
2. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS.
3. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one really knows about it.
Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform which only has sunset support for RSS
Every site I frequent has an RSS feed - even Reddit. As long as content producers support it, it’s not a problem.
* Shameless plug *: Our little service, Feedity - https://feedity.com, helps create RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs, and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.
On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and keep track of colleagues.
I think part of the problem is that there are no RSS readers that try to appeal to a mainstream user audience. They are all tailored to power users.
And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via https://granary.io/?input=html
I always liked microformats, but unlike RSS, they are truly dead. There never were many End-User Applications that utilized them. I hoped for a long time, browser would integrate features like automatic address or event detection, but it never materialized. And since Firefox won't even mention RSS feeds these days, I am not sure what microformats gets us at this point.
microformats + webmention == twitter-like replies across websites
RSS link+autodiscovery would be so cool on every blog!
Each one should use whatever they feel like, and I never understood the drama around Google's reader.
How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout them as they demand?
Because not enough readers use RSS to justify the time.
For example: https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-pa...
(Mine's additional fun because I also tried to make sure that three previous RSS URLs remained supported in my migrations across multiple blog engines over more than a decade and a half.)
(Looks like Jekyll-feed was added to GitHub Pages sometime in 2016, and I last updated my RSS feed way back in 2015.)