Why I will always love RSS | Hacker News Reader

Why I will always love RSS

jefclaes.be

109 pointsNemmie27 comments

Compared to RSS, centralized information distribution is not better but more profitable. That's the main reason why so many people and corporations have a pronounced interest in the demise of RSS.

But RSS will not die: It's a great standard for decentralized information distribution and a lot of people will keep using it.

I agree that most RSS clients are bad though. So those who are really concerned with the future of RSS should work on better clients and applications.

A great client is Shaun Inman's Fever[1]. It scales really well; the more feeds you add to it, the more tailored it becomes to your interests. It's not free but it's easily the best aggregator I've seen.

[1] http://feedafever.com/

As for a hosted FOSS web reader, I can recommend Newsblur: http://www.newsblur.com

Nice to hear, I am not the only one who uses RSS for extremely intense reading of all web sites and blogs I admire. Average users are heading more like to a TV-like reading mode; which is close to "passive". But It is nice to see there are a lot of hackers who want to "actively" select what they want to read.

Newsblur's UI is really excellent. It's the first (and so far) only RSS reader I've paid for.

I'm a big fan of NetNewsWire (http://netnewswireapp.com/)

The designers very explicitly set out to create an interface you could navigate with one hand, enabling you to slowly drink your morning coffee with the other.

I've been quite pleased with TinyTinyRSS lately - it's got some UI bugs, esp. in the web client, but self-hosted web-based RSS reading + sync to Android client is full of win for me.

For the iPad Mr. Reader is by far my favorite RSS reader and I have tried many.

http://www.curioustimes.de/mrreader/

There should be a simple rule: if your site/app presents any data chronologically, there has to be an RSS/Atom feed for it.

Am I the only one loving Atom?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_compa...

Frankly, except for the people developing the readers, the RSS/Atom distinction is completely irrelevant. RSS is used as a simplification for RSS/Atom.

I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them away.

Most are minor but Atom feeds explicitly state content type. This could be a security issue with RSS since there is no reliable way to guess between plain text or escaped HTML.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)#Content_model

I've been using RSS for ~10 years and I still don't know why I would choose Atom over RSS or RSS 2.0 or whatever.

Because it's possible to represent the characters >, < and & in the title of an item in an Atom feed.

You aren't. Indeed, when I read a headline like "Will RSS die?" for the first time, I expected to find an article about how Atom will replace RSS.

The reason given for why rss is dying (i get all my content from the people I follow on twitter ie: I follow certain taste makers) doesn't consider how a person who you follow gets content that you want to read.

I'm willing to bet that somewhere along the line a person being followed is using rss to some extent. But not exclusively.

rss makes it potentially easier for the "taste makers" to fulfill their role in curating content.

rss's supposed replacement would lead to the internet being even more of an echo chamber than it already is.

Also, how does one persons blog post asserting that "rss is dying" constitute "a bunch of noise in the tech community" worthy of attention?

I think the reason RSS didn't pickup among the average crowed is because of Google Reader and browser's native RSS handling.

If only the website owners had implemented easy and known feature for users to "receive" the content, i.e, get RSS via email, get it via SMS, chat, etc, etc....all instead of getting it in your browser or in Google Reader or in some other geeky program....than RSS as a push technology, might have seen a better perspective.

Although there were services available which would translate the RSS for average users, but they weren't close to the original website.

Is there still room to build something like this? I think blogs/etc.. would only benefit and make it spread real easy?

What's wrong with google reader? It works fine for me.

There's nothing wrong with Google Reader, just as there's nothing wrong with Google Plus. It is just so that Google Reader has not seen a mass adoption beyond the niche tech crowd, so it couldn't lift the RSS upwards.

I can remember the time I used bloglines and had over 1000+ feeds. It got to be a chore—at the time I believed that I needed to read everything and set myself up for failure. Now I treat them as periodic inspiration and brain-fodder on-demand for whatever the hive-mind of the Internet has top-of-mind that day. With feeds roughly classified, I'm using Feedly as my "newspaper" of interesting things.

RSS may die, but the idea of a machine-readable subscription and notification system never will.

Also of note, why don't financial institutions offer read only RSS feeds of transactions? Logging into their site manually with a browser is a PITA, and their data is only in formats that suck and need to be converted from.

I'd love to be able to script up a really RSS grabber that dumps directly to disk and other scripts that do all this automatically.

Erm, because you still need to log in to validate that you're authorized to read the feed.

Many financial institutions make available transaction logs in CSV and other machine-readable formats, usually labeled "Export to QuickBooks" or something similar.

Plenty of other ways to do auth out there. Heck, if they just emailed me data that would be an improvement.

The problem with CSV, QFX, and similar is that it generally doesn't contain all of the data available from the website, like check images, statements, etc.

What about using the well-defined, standardized solution to exactly that problem? (i.e. HTTP Auth)

If there's a new field that I want to learn about, I usually find the best blog that I can for it and subscribe to the RSS feed. Instant immersion.

How can Twitter/Facebook/whatever beat this where I have to comb through a bunch of noise to the get to the same content?

It's a bummer that we seem to be going backwards sometimes.

> I strongly believe the contemporary fetish of liking and sharing cheapens the way we consume our information.

It's not necessary to like, retweet, etc in order to consume the content. If all you want is to click on a link and get to an article, then that's all you have to do.

> Don't get me wrong, I do see value in community driven content, but there's also a lot of dirt and sensationalism.

Then curate the people you follow / subscribe to on your social networks. You have full control over the posts you see on Twitter, for example, especially if you create lists to only include accounts that tweet out new articles for a given blog or newspaper. Works just like an RSS feed, but it's integrated in the social product you use anyway (speaking from my perspective, at least).

> This forces me to absorb it all, even though most of their content doesn't go viral. This liberates me from feeling the urge to be connected all the friggin' time, plus more importantly, there is a gold mine of wisdom to be found in the non-controversial content out there.

Being forced to absorb it all and not miss a post is liberating? I often feel the opposite--that I need to disconnect and just accept I can't read everything on the Internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com