RSS Autodiscovery (2006)
rssboard.org
rssboard.org
This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).
RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.
Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...
nitter: Alternative Twitter frontend that provides RSS feeds
teddit: Alternative Reddit frontend that provides RSS feeds (Reddit itself still has RSS feeds, we'll see how that plays out though)
rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS feeds
It's been refreshing to subscribe to the feeds I want to see and not have "recommended" content stepping all over what I want to see. Recent trends make me worried some of these services are going to go away in the near future though.
Youtube natively offers per-channel rss feeds.
You have to go looking for it. In my testing only provides the latest few videos, not the entire back catalog. But I have a naive understanding of the RSS protocol I didn't see how to get more because they didn't expose a "next" link for the RSS feed.
You can stylize and embed things like a next link in an RSS feed but that should just point you to yet another XML file and it's not part of the standard.
That seems contrary to the idea that your RSS reader should be the one place you control your subscriptions from.
Which is something of a general problem—an on-site list of subscriptions is certainly also useful in ways the reader can’t really replicate in a generic way, yet it’s in the user’s interest to be the only one in control of that list instead of involving the website in it.
I can’t think of a good way to deal with this.
Now that sounds handy. Extensible, too.
Anyone know a way to pull email lists (eg mailman) via RSS feeds?
Best of both words. Allows me to go to the article and the comments.
hnrss.org does both of those things, lets you subscribe to just the front page, and loads more besides - including replied to your own comments, which is how I was alerted to your posting of this.
A bit of a shameless self-promotion plug: rss-bridge is great but I wanted to do the same from a command line program sending the output to stdout and without running a dedicated local web server, so I wrote newslinkrss ( https://github.com/ittner/newslinkrss/ )
It allowed me to replace a bunch of dedicated scripts at the cost of some complex command lines. It works pretty well for people who prefer desktop news readers to web-based ones.
Feedback is welcome.
Firefox: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nb...
In case you didn't know - you can append .rss at the end of a Mastodon profile url to get an RSS feed of it!
Unfortunately not supported by Mozilla Firefox 114 or Microsoft Edge.
It is still a very useful standard. I use https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss to add the icon to my browser. Plus even without browser support this allows you to just paste an article into your Feed Reader and most will use autodiscovery to find the feed for you. However without a browser icon you need to guess and check.
So I built Brook, it's pretty simple and hangs out in your sidebar on Firefox: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
See, decentralized content delivery such as RSS was not friendly enough to ads, so RSS had to be removed for better profits.
Needless to say that it was a nail in the coffin of internet information quality.
Firefox used to have this, I used it a lot. Am I that old?
Unfortunately live bookmarks have also gone away in Firefox, luckily I found an add-on for that.
Although I haven't seen an addon that handles SPA well. Ideally it would monitor the DOM for links being added and removed. Although that may be expensive to do in an extension.
https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=vimeo.com/user4464579
It's pretty rudimentary but alleviates some manual work.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$FOO
You can visit a channel's page directly, and copy the normal URL straight into your feed reader. It will do the right thing - thanks to the <link> tag, which YouTube advertises in the page source - as recommended by TFA. Your feed reader already knows what to do ;)
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="...">For a time shorts had the string "#shorts" in their titles which was great for filtering those out but then youtubers started using custom tags. And filtering for "#" seems too risky.
I recently found out that my feedreader, Feedbin, allows a media_duration field in their search/action syntax. Now I’m using that experimentally for filtering.
Sidenote: Interestingly enough Youtube’s feeds don’t expose duration. Those feeds are ancient, apparently untouched for 15 years. The <media:content> element still advertises its videos as application/x-shockwave-flash. Feedbin, according to its code on Github, does some custom extraction of the duration from the Website for its data model.
(Googlers who may read this: Please, for the love of god, don’t change anything. A crappy feed is still better than no feed at all.)
I hold chrome responsible for decline of RSS.