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Comment by DeLopSpot | Hacker News Reader

It seems that RSS feed generators are a bit like static site generators: it's often thought to be easier to make your own than to learn to use someone else's.

Anyway, here's another self-hosted open source RSS feed generator for arbitrary websites: https://github.com/hueyy/HungryHippo

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Because the design of RSS/Atom put all of the complexity on the client (polling, state management, etc.) it's literally the same as static site generation. And by "the same", I don't mean "an equivalent but separate problem". I actually think having two separate generators—one outputting HTML, the other RSS—seems a bit wasteful. They're both parsing (presumably) the same content hierarchy and outputting it as SGML/XML-ish documents served over HTTP. One app should probably just do both (and it's easy to make your own that does)

This entire post has galvanized me to write up an idea I've been noodling over as I work on a reader myself: a standard that would eliminate precisely the waste you mention by specifying within the HTML all that's needed for a feed.

See https://sfeed.org. In the spirit of the multi-meaninged RSS acronym itself, the S might stand for scrape, selector, speed, or of course Scotty.

Vinni, might you be interested in enabling the standard in Feed Me Up?

There already is such a standard! https://microformats.org/wiki/hatom

Happy to take a merge request that adds the option to set `extends = "sfeed"` or `extends = "hatom"` and then automatically sets the correct selectors though.

(That said, if a publisher goes through the trouble of adhering to those selectors, they might as well publish a feed while they're at it :)

https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed is the up-to-date version

I like this name better — the h prefix is cool in that it shows things are coming all the way from basic HTML.

Microformats, I see this is the proper way.

Ah thanks - been out of that world for a long time now.

Ah thanks, didn't know about hAtom, will investigate that.

I do think it's (much) easier to add some HTML classes than output an entire separate file.

I've been using Nuxt + Strapi as my new CMS stack, and while it's a big step forward in so many other ways, outputting an RSS feed is far from automatic.

I disagree. I find the it wasteful, that every source will implement their way of rendering data. If we ignore the ad-problem for a moment, I would love if RSS would be the output of every website and the client then renders HTML to achieve the best UX possible. No broken layouts, no distractions, no dark pattern, just content.

This is more less how Google Web Light worked.

I mean, it's exactly like a static site generator — I'd call it JAMstack, except the "API" is a plain HTML page and the markup is RSS :)

So yeah, definitely straightforward enough for a case of NIH syndrome. I think putting together the website took more time than writing the tool itself...

I created a automated HTML->Feed mapper [0], that simply analyzes the structure and offers you potential feeds.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/

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