6 ms·

Everything still needs RSS! There is no better way of getting notifications. I don't have to create an account, I don't have to give out my email and I don't ha

by kgwxd 10y ago

Everything still needs RSS! There is no better way of getting notifications. I don't have to create an account, I don't have to give out my email and I don't have to re-search through everything I've already read or decided not to read. I canceled my YouTube account a while ago, realized I sort of missed a few channels and found myself just trying to remember to check their pages every now and then. Then I realized YouTube channels actually have hidden RSS feeds. The experience is better than what you get with a YouTube account. The number you see next to the channel actually indicates the number of videos uploaded to that channel that you haven't seen yet. I still have no clue what the numbers next to subscribed channels meant when I had an account.

robobro 10y ago
I would argue that ATOM is better: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#samples http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... Sure, they're both automatically generated / automatically read, but ATOM seems like an improvement syntactically ... http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/
- onli 10y ago
  I worked on both Atom and RSS Feeds for blogging engines. Frankly, Atom had for me no real advantage. RSS is easy to generate, and it is supported properly by so many clients that Atom can be comfortably ignored. Stuff like the guid not being a guid work in practice just fine.
  - redwall_hp 10y ago
    To be honest, they're basically interchangeable. Most parsing libraries will handle both, and it's entirely down to preference.
    - narrowrail 10y ago
      From my [not extensive] research, ATOM open source libraries have better support for authenticated feeds.
    - firasd 10y ago
      But working on a blogging engine (producing feeds) or saying parsing libraries will handle it is just externalizing the problems with RSS to the consumers. That's where the real pain point is: understanding the content of an RSS feed, especially when thousands of feeds can have a multitude of different quirks.
  - talideon 10y ago
    The problem isn't generation, but consumption. If you're consuming feeds, Atom is significantly better than RSS because it's better specified.
- gkya 10y ago
  Well they are both the same as a medium, that is apart from technical benefits to the producer and the consumer programmes, they are both easy, easy to implement, easy to publish, easy to (un)?subscribe and free of third-party involvement.
monksy 10y ago
I've got to agree with this a lot. With email, the information is forcefully pushed to you, with RSS it's a lot easier to be anonymous and request the data only for the channels you want. I'm rather tired of people calling it dead when there is no supporting body that is required to keep the protocol alive.
- aq3cn 10y ago
  Masses does not anything beyond what FB or Twitter spoon feed them with.
  - narrowrail 10y ago
    My controversial opinion is that UI designers favored the commercial implementations because of the persuasion of wealth. But, if I'm being rational, I believe Twitter and FB are teaching people what a feed is and how it is useful. Once these ideas are concretely in the minds of most people, the open source community will have an easier time providing solutions that cater to non-technical folk.
    - tacostakohashi 10y ago
      Unfortunately, it's actually the opposite. I'm so old, I actually used to use the RSS feed Facebook provided for their notifications (wall posts) with Google Reader. That's right - there was a point in time when you could consume your Facebook feed via RSS (all in one place, alongside your other feeds), actually provided by Facebook. The chronology is the other way around. People knew what a feed was and how it was useful, and Facebook worked out how to monopolize it and put their ads into it.
      - aq3cn 10y ago
        I hope they still provide RSS of notifications and public posts. Last time, I checked they used to do that. I am not on Facebook anymore.
      - ryan_test_1 10y ago
nandhp 10y ago
Yes, I switched to YouTube RSS feeds a few weeks ago and it is so much better than YouTube's subscription notifications. - The message subject has the video title - You can subscribe to playlists - Notifications aren't randomly lost (a new feature YouTube launched a few weeks ago) It's amazing, so they'll probably deprecate the RSS feeds next week. [As to the software, I'm trying out rss2email with patches to include media thumbnails]
- exolymph 10y ago
  > It's amazing, so they'll probably deprecate the RSS feeds next week. 2 real
aq3cn 10y ago
I must agree with on this and add that it's these giants which are driven to make it obsolete. I don't want AI to decide news feeds for me, when I can set my own filters for specific news from my news sources in TinyRSS. These giants are taking away control from my hands in name of making my life easier. I have given up, no more expectation from their corporate business. Leaving their platform for forever. I have my own ways to get what I want.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I don't understand how people keep declaring RSS "dead", when I have never yet found a site I wanted to follow that didn't support it.
- spikej 10y ago
  There are TONS now; Especially newer static generated sites where the owners don't bother setting up RSS
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    To be fair it's the new(old) fad of Static Site Generators that are at fault. They don't generate a feed file, or if they do the owners haven't bothered to (or don't know how to) surface it. Google (and other search engines) have a standard for sitemaps: /sitemap.xml in the root of the site. It'd be nice if there was a similar standard for rss, i.e. /feed.xml - which means browsers and other clients can attempt to auto-discover it. I know there's the 'link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"' meta-tag but again most users don't know to look for it now that browsers don't have the little icon on the toolbar, and a lot of self-coders/site-generators don't bother to implement it. At the end of the day, RSS has fallen out of favour due to it's poor support for user-tracking and advert injection - the big sites don't use it for exactly that reason, and the rest of the internet sheep are following suit. It's another nail in the Internet open-standards coffin :(
bhrgunatha 10y ago
I rely on RSS for podcasts (which I love) and also for both news and information. I've found nothing better for having a single place where you choose the content and absorb the information at your own pace. I'm in the minority preferring a desktop application though - so it an sit in the background and I can switch to it for short 5-minute burst every couple of hours rather than visiting a web site. Sadly there seem to be no desktop apps that are maintained anymore. I'm currently using RSSOwl, but it's no longer being maintained and has started crashing regularly.
- kranner 10y ago
  > Sadly there seem to be no desktop apps that are maintained anymore. iTunes supports RSS if you're on Mac or Windows though it's not obvious (File->Subscribe to podcast... add RSS link)
  - bhrgunatha 10y ago
    Thanks but I'm on Linux.
    - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
      There's Feedreader, at least: https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/ https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/ I'm sure there must be others out there for Linux? There are several available for OS X (er, macOS); I use a commercial one called Reeder, but there's also NetNewsWire and the open source ViennaRSS (which appears to still be in active development).
    - avhon1 10y ago
      Here's an incomplete list of graphical RSS readers for Linux that have had releases in the last year: QuiteRSS [http://quiterss.org/ http://quiterss.org/] KDE Kontact [https://userbase.kde.org/Kontact https://userbase.kde.org/Kontact] Liferea [http://lzone.de/liferea/ http://lzone.de/liferea/] RSS Guard [https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard] Seamonkey [http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ http://www.seamonkey-project.org/] Thunderbird [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/] Firefox ("live bookmarks") [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/] In the console, I like newsbeuter [http://www.newsbeuter.org/ http://www.newsbeuter.org/]

by kgwxd 10y ago

robobro 10y ago

I would argue that ATOM is better: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#samples http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... Sure, they're both automatically generated / automatically read, but ATOM seems like an improvement syntactically ... http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

onli 10y ago
I worked on both Atom and RSS Feeds for blogging engines. Frankly, Atom had for me no real advantage. RSS is easy to generate, and it is supported properly by so many clients that Atom can be comfortably ignored. Stuff like the guid not being a guid work in practice just fine.
- redwall_hp 10y ago
  To be honest, they're basically interchangeable. Most parsing libraries will handle both, and it's entirely down to preference.
  - narrowrail 10y ago
    From my [not extensive] research, ATOM open source libraries have better support for authenticated feeds.
  - firasd 10y ago
    But working on a blogging engine (producing feeds) or saying parsing libraries will handle it is just externalizing the problems with RSS to the consumers. That's where the real pain point is: understanding the content of an RSS feed, especially when thousands of feeds can have a multitude of different quirks.
- talideon 10y ago
  The problem isn't generation, but consumption. If you're consuming feeds, Atom is significantly better than RSS because it's better specified.
gkya 10y ago
Well they are both the same as a medium, that is apart from technical benefits to the producer and the consumer programmes, they are both easy, easy to implement, easy to publish, easy to (un)?subscribe and free of third-party involvement.

monksy 10y ago

I've got to agree with this a lot. With email, the information is forcefully pushed to you, with RSS it's a lot easier to be anonymous and request the data only for the channels you want. I'm rather tired of people calling it dead when there is no supporting body that is required to keep the protocol alive.

aq3cn 10y ago
Masses does not anything beyond what FB or Twitter spoon feed them with.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  My controversial opinion is that UI designers favored the commercial implementations because of the persuasion of wealth. But, if I'm being rational, I believe Twitter and FB are teaching people what a feed is and how it is useful. Once these ideas are concretely in the minds of most people, the open source community will have an easier time providing solutions that cater to non-technical folk.
  - tacostakohashi 10y ago
    Unfortunately, it's actually the opposite. I'm so old, I actually used to use the RSS feed Facebook provided for their notifications (wall posts) with Google Reader. That's right - there was a point in time when you could consume your Facebook feed via RSS (all in one place, alongside your other feeds), actually provided by Facebook. The chronology is the other way around. People knew what a feed was and how it was useful, and Facebook worked out how to monopolize it and put their ads into it.
    - aq3cn 10y ago
      I hope they still provide RSS of notifications and public posts. Last time, I checked they used to do that. I am not on Facebook anymore.
    - ryan_test_1 10y ago

nandhp 10y ago

Yes, I switched to YouTube RSS feeds a few weeks ago and it is so much better than YouTube's subscription notifications. - The message subject has the video title - You can subscribe to playlists - Notifications aren't randomly lost (a new feature YouTube launched a few weeks ago) It's amazing, so they'll probably deprecate the RSS feeds next week. [As to the software, I'm trying out rss2email with patches to include media thumbnails]

exolymph 10y ago
> It's amazing, so they'll probably deprecate the RSS feeds next week. 2 real

aq3cn 10y ago

I must agree with on this and add that it's these giants which are driven to make it obsolete. I don't want AI to decide news feeds for me, when I can set my own filters for specific news from my news sources in TinyRSS. These giants are taking away control from my hands in name of making my life easier. I have given up, no more expectation from their corporate business. Leaving their platform for forever. I have my own ways to get what I want.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

I don't understand how people keep declaring RSS "dead", when I have never yet found a site I wanted to follow that didn't support it.

spikej 10y ago
There are TONS now; Especially newer static generated sites where the owners don't bother setting up RSS
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  To be fair it's the new(old) fad of Static Site Generators that are at fault. They don't generate a feed file, or if they do the owners haven't bothered to (or don't know how to) surface it. Google (and other search engines) have a standard for sitemaps: /sitemap.xml in the root of the site. It'd be nice if there was a similar standard for rss, i.e. /feed.xml - which means browsers and other clients can attempt to auto-discover it. I know there's the 'link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"' meta-tag but again most users don't know to look for it now that browsers don't have the little icon on the toolbar, and a lot of self-coders/site-generators don't bother to implement it. At the end of the day, RSS has fallen out of favour due to it's poor support for user-tracking and advert injection - the big sites don't use it for exactly that reason, and the rest of the internet sheep are following suit. It's another nail in the Internet open-standards coffin :(

bhrgunatha 10y ago

I rely on RSS for podcasts (which I love) and also for both news and information. I've found nothing better for having a single place where you choose the content and absorb the information at your own pace. I'm in the minority preferring a desktop application though - so it an sit in the background and I can switch to it for short 5-minute burst every couple of hours rather than visiting a web site. Sadly there seem to be no desktop apps that are maintained anymore. I'm currently using RSSOwl, but it's no longer being maintained and has started crashing regularly.

kranner 10y ago
> Sadly there seem to be no desktop apps that are maintained anymore. iTunes supports RSS if you're on Mac or Windows though it's not obvious (File->Subscribe to podcast... add RSS link)
- bhrgunatha 10y ago
  Thanks but I'm on Linux.
  - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
    There's Feedreader, at least: https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/ https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/ I'm sure there must be others out there for Linux? There are several available for OS X (er, macOS); I use a commercial one called Reeder, but there's also NetNewsWire and the open source ViennaRSS (which appears to still be in active development).
  - avhon1 10y ago
    Here's an incomplete list of graphical RSS readers for Linux that have had releases in the last year: QuiteRSS [http://quiterss.org/ http://quiterss.org/] KDE Kontact [https://userbase.kde.org/Kontact https://userbase.kde.org/Kontact] Liferea [http://lzone.de/liferea/ http://lzone.de/liferea/] RSS Guard [https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard] Seamonkey [http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ http://www.seamonkey-project.org/] Thunderbird [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/] Firefox ("live bookmarks") [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/] In the console, I like newsbeuter [http://www.newsbeuter.org/ http://www.newsbeuter.org/]