netghost

Since you asked, I'll drop it here. I built Brook, and it works well enough for me that I often forget I built it, or that it isn't just part of Firefox: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

Bonus: If anyone uses it, you'll increase the global user base by several percent.

I don't know your background, but if you're interested hacking on an open source, locally run RSS client, I built a reader that should be able to support this fairly easily.

https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

I could imagine adding a collector feed or folder that just watches for keywords in the title or perhaps content.

Anyways, if you have an interest or would just like to explore what that might look like, open an issue. It's mostly feature complete for me, but I poke at it every now and then.

You're entirely right, and yet I think there's still a place for it.

It all depends on what you want to use it for. For my use case, I built a feed reader that just needs to know the titles, URLS, and publication dates of articles. That let me build an RSS/Atom reader that lets me curate my own news feeds and delegates everything else to the normal browser.

Are there inconsistencies and broken feeds? Sure a few, but for my purposes, I can ignore 99% of that. Is it wasteful? Sure, it. could be more efficient, but honestly downloading React and a hundred dependencies every time I visit a webpage is as well.

Fear not though, many sites built with tools like Gatsby aren't including RSS feeds, so your wishes may still come true.

I wrote an RSS reader named Brook that's open source, runs on Firefox, and keeps all your data local, so you don't need to rely on a service that might disappear.

There's little or no keyboard support at the moment, but if you're interested in helping to either develop or make some suggestions, I'd be up for improving it! Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re... Source: https://outgoing.prod.mozaws.net/v1/08a450f6d21388f6bfc51f2b...

Wow, hey folks as the author here, I'm really surprised to see this pop up on HN.

It's been a long time since I wrote this, and I've come to appreciate that there are a lot of nuances, a lot of different teams, and a lot of different ways incentives are aligned in different environments.

I'd love to hear some illustrations of ways y'all have navigated these issues. What factors made it successful? When would it not have worked?

Howdy, I was the author of this a lifetime ago.

Having been on a nebula project with a timeline once or twice, you're right, this is definitely a trap to avoid.

I'd love to hear an example of how you've negotiated it.

Hey there, I'm a bit surprised to see this reposted. I'm the original author.

I don't think it requires perfectly spherical humans in a frictionless office, but it does require everyone to have the same incentives in place.

When I wrote this, I worked on a pretty well aligned team with a very short power distance. If you're in a truly adversarial position, you probably need to take a different tact, or find a new role.

So that you can implement new layout algorithms, gradient generation and such in user space.

It's extremely unlikely that most developers will use this directly.

Can someone clarify what the new URL() thing is?

There's a happy medium in my mind where you just use RSS to notify you of new content, and then click through to see the real post.

That's the approach I take with the RSS reader I've built anyways.

The "patterns" documentation seems like a good place to get oriented around the ways they suggest people use this Tauri:

https://tauri.studio/en/docs/usage/patterns/about-patterns

It doesn't use firefox sync yet, but it probably could.

I think it's fairly restricted on how much data you can sync and I'd want to make sure "normal" usage doesn't get too close to that.

Oh, of course. That makes a ton of sense, I'll think about how to do that shortly.

If you're on Github adding an issue would help me remember, if not I'll try to keep it top of mind until I put the kids to bed.

I should work RSS into the title… feed encompasses RSS, Atom, and then a few other tricks I use to get feeds of content.

It _should_ tell you you're already subscribed if the feed is in your list. It gets a bit tricky with redirects and non canonical urls.

If you use github, drop an issue there detailing what you're seeing. If not, then let me know in a DM or this thread.

Also thank you for using Brook, you now account for 2% of the world wide usage ;)

So I take the opposite view of preferring to read on the actual pages.

I'm curious though, I've built a feed reader that caters to my preference, but I'd like to make it useful to more folks. If you could automatically open articles in "Reader Mode" (FireFox supports this for instance) would that make reading in the browser more palatable to you?

RSS lets me see the content I care about without black box algorithms getting in the way.

This is so important to me that I wrote a feed reader as a browser plugin so I don't need to worry about a service disappearing some day.

If you're curious it's Brook[1], and if you like hacking on things, it's open source[2]. There's a branch that works on Chrome, but I really like Firefox's support for showing content in a sidebar.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

[2] http://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

That's an interesting use case. My POV has always been that the site itself is the best representation of the content and completely ignore the feed content.

It was a sandboxed online Ruby interpreter. Oh gosh, it must have been at least 13 years ago now. The idea that I could execute arbitrary Ruby in a web based repl taking to a server was pretty wild then. Now with docker and web assembly we have lots of options for this kind of thing, but then it was quite exciting.

Why do some people like onions?

Let's not say "Why do Rubyists like this…", consider instead "Why do humans like this…". Some of us liked it because it was fun, and appealed to our sense of humor. Ruby was weird back then. Some of us didn't like it, and for them there was the Pickaxe book among others.

Personally I loved what _why did in the early Ruby scene. In fact one day I cold mailed him because I was feeling rather blue, and he sent back a link to a new project of his he hadn't released yet that blew my mind back then. It was smaller community, and there was more room for play and joy.

I think the more nuanced point folks tend to make is that they catch the errors at Run Time instead of Compile Time, and that the cost of strict typing is greater than that of catching it at Run Time.

Personally, I'm agnostic (I make mistakes in all phases and fix most of them eventually ;) )

This _is_ how it was for quite a while. Check out Rails as of about Rails3 or so. Unobtrusive JS, serving up partial HTML, etc.

There's a set of interactions for which this works incredibly well and a set where it falls short.

If your UX and data model support the notion of users interacting with a single resource at a time it's really effective. If you have lots of data that has effects on other data you might be displaying, or you need lots of fine grained interactions, a full client side app will probably provide the best experience.

You know, when you had to support ie6 and php was cutting edge, the good old days!

I jest of course, but while frontend tooling has gotten quite complex, there's a good reason. Transpiling, minifying, and tree shaking are non trivial, and pretty much a requirement if you want to build a rich client (though not everyone needs one).

Does anyone know if anything comparable to SMAC these days? I probably spent more time playing this game than anything else.

Since this seems to be the thread where everyone mentions the RSS feed reader they use/write, I'll share Brook. It's a very minimal feed reader that gives you what you need and gets out of the way.

You can use it in Firefox right now, and if anyone is interested, I'll port it to Chrome. Honestly I wrote it because my old favorite feed reader Sage wasn't supported after Firefox switched to the web extensions standards.

Give it a peek if you either want to see how it works, or you just want a simple way to browse your favorite sites in your browser.

Source: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

(Okay, now let's get back to the regularly scheduled outrage around the decline of RSS and maybe mention how Google doesn't support its products anymore ;) )

Just remember, the people who read and respond to you are probably not the people who either implemented or designed features and bugs you may run across.

Still my favorite editor, but I really appreciate the language server protocol support in vscode.

I had a similar experience, eventually I found the message in my spam folder. It's ridiculous that messages marked as spam show up on the calendar, but now we know.

I see a lot of complaints about the PDF format here, what's the alternative though? Is there another format that achieves the same goals which people should rally around? Just curious given PDF's ubiquity.

(For the record, I had to deal with text encodings in PDFs, and yes, it was a pain)

Babel can transpile typescript now and strip the types off. So I think it's pretty easy to back out of you ever need to.

I suspect you can't do some of the fancier type contortions. For the simple case, I think it works just fine.