Hacker News Reader

Comment by derekzhouzhen | Hacker News Reader

One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.

I'd also recommend to add open graph meta for the blog posts. Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.

View on HN

> One nice thing I recognized is that the generated RSS feed contains full html text. I wish more blogging platforms are like this; save a lot of effort for feed readers.

The reason some blogs don't include the whole thing in the RSS is because they want you to visit the site for the ad revenue. It's not an oversight.

Blogging is (was?) a job for some people. It wasn't completely supported by ads, but ads are part of it. It's like YouTubers before YouTube.

Maybe today, but I personally stopped providing full text in the feeds of my now defunct and free from advertising blog, because my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a spammy full of advertising website.

This was around 2005 for what I can remember. Time is flying...

> my content was directly vacuumed

This happens with the HTML contents just as easily. Perhaps just include a unique identifier in the text per client, and a link back to the source.

> This happens with the HTML contents just as easily.

On an individual scale, yes. But if you're a spammer and want to vaccuum up text from 1000 sites, you'll skip writing a scraper for individual sites (which may change their formatting later anyway) and just use reliably-formatted RSS feeds.

Correct. To the point where most black hat tools that spammers use will have rss feed ingestion as the primary or only data ingestion method.

That was probably true back in 2004, but today there are numerous reader view, full text converter, and advanced web spider projects that anybody can plug in and get the full text from at least 90% of web sites, with no extra effort.

Unethical people is going to do whatever they can. Life is much more enjoyable if you just ignore them and whatever shit they are going to do with the content you willingly shared with the world for free.

> Life is much more enjoyable if …

That sentence has widely different endings for different people.

> my content was directly vacuumed and inserted into a spammy full of advertising website

For all its faults, this is something I have no shame invoking DMCA for. You still own the copyright on your writing even if you publish it for free online.

How do you "invoke DMCA" on a random spam site? I've only heard it mentioned WRT central authority sites like YouTube, etc.

Contact the host. I can't recall if I've done this before but I do recall that it often works.

There are some downsides: interactive pages won’t work and automated content stealers. It very easy to copy articles from such RSS feeds because you don’t need to search for the text in HTML.

I haven't checked it out yet, but... Wouldn't one not want html text in the feed, if one chose to use a blogging platform whose focus was text and simplicity? I prefer to read feeds with plain text myself.

Images are a feature many articles benefit from.

De gustibus I suppose, but to me, “Images are a feature many or most articles use and which a very small number benefit from.”

You're right. I shouldn't have said many. I forgot some like to put memes in their articles. I still think the ability to use images can be important, depending on topic. Quite simply a blog about anything graphics-related would benefit.

I've been told Medium requires a huge photo at the top of each post, regardless if it makes sense or not for the article. Most of the time those articles are simply junk.

Agreed, but on a technical level it makes it harder for the client software to have to decide what to do with those resources. A plain-text post can sit on my drive for months until I get around to reading it with barely any impact on disk space usage.

With images I either have to eat the storage utilization for them or suffer a privacy leak by loading them when the post is opened. For the latter, there's always a small risk that a post could be deleted or an entire website vanish in between the time my feed updates and the time I open a post, in which case it would be left with text but broken images. I guess they could be inlined (like `<img src="data:image/png;base64,etc"/>`) to avoid that risk. It's even more obnoxiously complex if we're using the modern `picture`/`srcset`/etc to serve multiple resolutions and image formats for various screen sizes, connection speeds, and platforms.

Most sane feed readers sanitize the html down to a dumb level; just headings, paragraphs, links and some inline images. If you only have the text to begin with, hyper-links won't work.

That's great, but unfortunately the HTML view only shows the TITLE, ala HackerNews, and not even a single summary sentence or paragraph there. So we've got a good RSS feed, but a bad HTML view.

> Presumably people will want to share the posts somewhere; a nice set of open graph metas goes a long way.

Genuine question - what does this enable? I assume the big guys love the additional tagging for engaging similar content, but what else is there?

a nice looking link preview.

It lets you decide how a link you share is presented on a variety of supporting platforms, with a few bits of metadata. You can control whether/how it presents your page's title, a preview image, summary/description, and who it's attributed to. All of which are desirable for content authors, not just those platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com