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I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for
by afloatboat 11y ago
I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything.
RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have a pretty nice design, but make it hard to get an overview of all the news and you easily miss things. With RSS I know that when I start my client all the articles they posted will be there and they will still be there when I start my client next month. I can manually mark articles that don't interest me as read, but keep others for when I have more time.
I follow about 50 sites, so if I had to check manually if any of them had updates (often in various sections, because they don't have a main overview that shows everything) I'd lose way more time. It's also synced over all my devices. I use the Reederapp in combination with Feedly, and it syncs over my Macs, iPhone and iPad. I have a backlog of about 500 articles, some months old, imagine having to go through a specific site and scrolling back page after page after page to get to that specific article you saw the title of 2 months ago.
I wish more sites would show the entire article in RSS feeds instead of a short preview. I understand the advertising reasons behind requiring users to click through, but with RSS you have a plain article that's optimized for reading without all the distractions of a website.
- olliedev 11y agoHey, you should check this out for sites that don't give you entire articles in RSS feeds: http://fulltextrssfeed.com/ http://fulltextrssfeed.com/
- jeremysmyth 11y agoRSS has largely become invisible. Many CMSs just support it, which is great if you use RSS, and irrelevant if you don't. Many RSS readers are flexible enough to find the feed if you point at a site's base URL too, so while that implicit contract is in place, life is good. However, that very invisibility might prove to be its downfall: RSS is so incredibly useful to those who know about it that the only way to keep it going is for those of us who create to ensure our platforms keep creating it. I miss seeing that little orange RSS icon though. edit: I also miss seeing Dave Winer comment on threads like this!
- davewiner 11y agoI just posted a long comment at the top level of this thread. ;-)
- lectrick 11y agoI just want to take a moment to hat-tip a legendary dev. I've heard of you at LEAST since MORE for the Mac rocked the sales charts when I was a teen (I also FONDLY miss Macworld Expos, attended a bunch of them!) Thanks for being an awesome nerd!
- Concours 11y agoOh well, I heard you and you should check what we do. It looks like this:http://www.feedsapi.com http://www.feedsapi.com will make your life with RSS nicer and should improve your user experience with RSS. Here are some of the things you can do: Turn those shortened rss feeds into full Text rss feeds, curate your feeds with keywords tomonly get what you really care about, curate your feeds with a more complex filter structure using RegEx, get your feeds items to be delivered everywhere in any format (htmk, txt, pdf, word...) and in full lenght ! 50 sites is a lot... And you may not need to read all of those feeds items so curation makes sense in this specific case. I hope this helps.