25 ms·

RSS: there's nothing better

640 points by dyates 9y ago

millette 9y ago
2nd RSS post today, and no mention of PubSubHubbub, aka WebSub? Or maybe it's just a low-level feature, not important enough? Strange days indeed.
_pdp_ 9y ago
Google killed the RSS feeds for me. On the flip-side, I am thinking to get back to them sometime soon.
- VLM 9y ago
  I was kinda worried about RSS "dying" due to google. Before google reader died I had about 140 feeds in my newsblur, right now in my newsblur tab I have 134. I'm not thinking google reader dying impacted the RSS ecosystem very much although there was a very small measurable effect.
- anabisengrin 9y ago
  Why do you act in such a victimized way ? You were trapped in a closed system, the trap crumbled down and now you're free. Google did not kill RSS, it killed its RSS reader and that's it. The number of websites providing an RSS feed has not declined since. I mean I really do not understand your way of thinking ? When Google is no more, will it have killed maps and videos ?
  - gcgggfxsdg 9y ago
    Are you stupid, French, or both? Don’t. fucking. put. a. space. after. a. question. mark. That. is. not. English. Thanks!
- mantas 9y ago
  I stopped RSSing after Google Reader was gone. I started using RSS (well, whatever is left of RSS..) few months ago. Happy!
  - fredley 9y ago
    I just logged into The Old Reader for the first time in a long time. What a lot of interesting stuff I used to follow.
- smsm42 9y ago
  When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them. Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years, nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.
  - hylianwarrior 9y ago
    I came to this thread from Feedly :)
    - InternetUser 9y ago
      Same here. I follow HN FROM Feedly so I can minimize the risk of missing any post.
  - corobo 9y ago
    Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles
    - pencilcode 9y ago
      I use reeder as the client, much better than feedly ‘s ui but feedly is still the backend. Working great since I came back to rss for about a year.
      - corobo 9y ago
        Thanks I'll give that a go. I am going to have so many unread articles if I get back into RSS reading hah
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
digi_owl 9y ago
Ah yes, twitter lists. It seems they came up with those to undercut the major reason people used the likes of Tweetdeck. Only to later buy up, and shut down the desktop version of, the very same client. And now it languishes in some side area of the service, seemingly forgotten.
0x006A 9y ago
so whats a good rss reader in 2017?
- anabisengrin 9y ago
  koffnewsbeuterkoff
- subroutine 9y ago
  digg reader works fine for me. screencap: http://i.imgur.com/3GbYB61.png http://i.imgur.com/3GbYB61.png link: http://digg.com/reader http://digg.com/reader
  - petepete 9y ago
    I wasn't aware Digg Reader existed, thanks. Now, will my 12 year old Digg account work?
    - subroutine 9y ago
      Hah. Similar experience last year when I tried to sign up for digg reader and it said my email address was already in use O.o
- renchap 9y ago
  As a heavy RSS user, I really like Newsblur
  - VLM 9y ago
    This discussion would be improved with pricing data. Newsblur is free, although I'm one of the 6034 premium paid users. Newsblur never fails me, kinda impressive how well it works.
- fnl 9y ago
  the (good) old reader and newsblur are my favorites https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ http://newsblur.com/ http://newsblur.com/
fredley 9y ago
I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now's the time.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion. By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)
  - nawtacawp 9y ago
    What are you using to aggregate the feeds?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).
      - ronjouch 9y ago
        Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?
fnl 9y ago
And you can push out news on RSS as they arrive, not just "weekly (newsletter) updates" or so.
tzahola 9y ago
B-but you can’t have javascript within RSS!
- petepete 9y ago
  Or tracking pixels! How will the marketing department cope?
  - onli 9y ago
    You absolutely can have tracking pixels in RSS feeds.
tiedmann 9y ago
Wow, I wrote some code just yesterday that consumes RSS-feeds thinking I was forever alone - guess I was wrong :)
mrmondo 9y ago
I truly love RSS, combining Feedly with Reeder makes for a fantastic experience. I wrote a brief post on how I use RSS recently: https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-rss/ https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-rss/
genericacct 9y ago
Well there could be something better if someone rewrote it in JSON; but it works so it's best left untouched i guess.
- pacifika 9y ago
  Search for jsonfeed
- pferde 9y ago
  There could be something better if someone wrote a completely new format with very strict requirements. Try implementing a RSS reader that can reliably keep track of which items/articles are new, which are old but changed, which are unchanged, etc. There is enough wiggle room in both RSS and Atom specifications to make you go crazy with all the crappy half-baked feed generators out there, which unfortunately still do not run afoul of the specs, despite pulling all kinds of inconsistent crap. I don't care if it's json, xml or something completely different, as long as the specs are tight and strict.
jwilk 9y ago
Atom syndication format is better than RSS. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29
- viraptor 9y ago
  There's no difference in the consumption method though, is there? I kind of lump Atom and RSS together in my mind. Some of my subscribed feeds use one, some use the other, but without looking at the URL, I couldn't tell.
  - onli 9y ago
    There is no practical difference at all. RSS has more mindshare outside the google universe, but all reader read both, the formats can be mapped from the one to the other, and all languages have libraries to create both. And also manually they are both equally easy to write. I for one opted to solely generate RSS wherever possible. Having two equally suited standards is a waste.
    - lifthrasiir 9y ago
      But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline. When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore updated articles. For the obvious reason (cough timely standardization cough) Atom is technically and often practically superior to the RSS family of formats (somehow not distinguished to each other). And after more than 10 years of usage, I'm pretty sure that every feed reader in the continued existence now has Atom support. [1] https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedparser/datetimes https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedpar...
      - onli 9y ago
        No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :) I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object. You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The blog engine I use has different options to handle that, I for one think just pushing a new entry with a new guid is the right solution; but then of course rss readers can't mark updates.
_up 9y ago
I wonder if "Rankings" from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back incentive to produce quality Content.
- shakna 9y ago
  No need to scrape: rankings are available by both APIs.
  - _up 9y ago
    To clarify, HN was only meant as an example. Newspapers have kind of a ranking too. A ranking could be derived from how long and in what spot it is positioned.
- r3bl 9y ago
  HN API doesn't have any limitations what so ever. I'm not using its RSS, but I have a script running on my server every five minutes that sends a new push notification on my phone every time a HN story reaches 500 points. Simple and straightforward way of keeping up with the tech, made in like 40 lines of Python: https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-scripts/blob/master/hn500-to-simplepush.py https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-scripts/b...
  - mrighele 9y ago
    Funny, for me 500 points would be a flag that the story is not technical enough, and probably about how the latest iPhone's UI sucks, gender inequality in SV, Google/FB/Hw manufacturer spying on our life, and many other similar topics that inevitably end up in a lot of bikeshedding
superwayne 9y ago
A friend and I made a tool/framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites that don't offer one. It's written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of code. http://github.com/nblock/feeds http://github.com/nblock/feeds
- onli 9y ago
  If the site is simple enough, one could also use my Yahoo Pipes revival project[0] to extract content from a page into an RSS feed. [0]: https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/
  - amiraliakbari 9y ago
    The sites seems somehow immature to me. The "Shared Pipes" sections lists a few examples, but the first one returns an empty feed and the second one returns "Internal Server Error". It is probably because of the definition of the pipes being outdated, but it needs better presentation.
    - onli 9y ago
      Hi, thanks for the feedback. The first pipe is filtering for crypto currency articles on HN, right now there seems to be none with those exact keywords, I'll add some more. The second is user-provided and probably dies because of the sub-pipe, I removed my upvote - now the second one is https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx, which works fine. In general I tried to keep backwards compatiblity as much as possible, I'm only aware of one single breaking change (filter via regexpression, which was not possible for long before the syntax changed and should not have affected many pipes).
4lch3m1st 9y ago
Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.
- r3bl 9y ago
  YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.
  - ygra 9y ago
    ... iff you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Sorry for the repeated post, but if you have an account, you can subscribe to the channel and then get an OPML file with all the feeds from the Subscriptions Manager page.
    - bhrgunatha 9y ago
      It is a pain - I've found 3 formats for users, channels and playlists: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<user name from url> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<id from url> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id from url> I wonder if there are more?
    - 4lch3m1st 9y ago
      One quick way to do that is by using NewPipe Android app. It has an RSS feed button. Plus, you get a lightweight YouTube frontend.
  - ino 9y ago
asymmetric 9y ago
I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves “stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine) I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome and didn’t always work. How do you folks solve this?
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  Personally, I just avoid such feeds. I’ve never found this problem with any high quality blogs I follow. The sites I’ve experienced this problem with most are old media companies, and they produce so much content, it’s probably best consumed via other means. It’s a shame more paywall sites don’t make their protected content available via authenticated feeds.
- beefield 9y ago
  I have not had time to figure out how this works, but in inoreader mobile app, you can pull down in the article stubs and quite often you get the full article downloaded directly in the app. Weirdest is that this seems to work even beyond some paywalls.
- username223 9y ago
  I don't mind the stubs, since they usually give me enough to know whether or not I want to read the whole article. For most sites that serve stubs, I only want to read a handful of what they publish.
- hasbot 9y ago
  Interestingly, many readers of /r/politics never read more than the headline anyways.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  tt-rss has a plug-in that lets you specify which part of the linked article is the actual content and then, when it pulls the feed, it replaces the feed content with the text of the specified element.
leejo 9y ago
I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging process, it's not a way that sites can keep users hooked on the site to boost ad impressions. RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's nothing better. [1] https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/ https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/
- Arnt 9y ago
  What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS. Right? RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    He's partially right, the web 2.0 trend was all about interaction, "we" all believed it would be heavens on earth while we now know it's far from that and now I (we?) would love to go back to light and simple aggregation.
  - barkingtoad 9y ago
    To be more exact, RSS is headline-oriented, so it's about clickbait. It is not about sharebait.
  - hopesthoughts 9y ago
    Well you can still have clickbait-like headlines with RSS, but it does take the viral element away,.
- matchagaucho 9y ago
sdfjkl 9y ago
RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.
- keypress 9y ago
  Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.
  - Andrenid 9y ago
    You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.
    - jojoo 9y ago
      a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head. if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.
    - keypress 9y ago
      That wasn't my point. Parent said RSS was the only sane way. Wordpress aside - email notifications can also be a 'sane' way.
- amelius 9y ago
  > Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways. Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.
h43z 9y ago
After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just have to press 'o' to open the article in my browser.
grape911 9y ago
I don't understand where this "RSS is dead" mantra came from. RSS does what it is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet. E.g. I don't have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels. Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to follow couple of pages I'm interested in: http://feed.exileed.com http://feed.exileed.com (supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other) or https://twitrss.me https://twitrss.me (Twitter only). I don't have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I'm not even talking about any news site. With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page into RSS feed. Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better. (I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is that their free plan is quite limited.)
Entangled 9y ago
The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time. It's just like an email client but just for newsletters. Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I'm now using Apple Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing. Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air. RSS is dead, long live newsletters.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  That is not dead which can eternal lie. I still derive significant value from Usenet. People keep saying that IRC is dead (because Slack) or that Jabber is dead (because Slack) but I use both of those daily. It's a big Internet, there's room for lots of stuff.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  Having a separate email for newsletters is a brilliant idea.
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's interesting, because that has really nothing to do with email or RSS as protocols, it's purely a social convention that daily/weekly aggregations get sent as newsletters rather than published as RSS feeds. As a counterexample, I follow Leah Neukirchen's Trivium, which is a feed that publishes a weekly post with a bunch of interesting links (mostly tech related). http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro And of course, there are tools to display emails inboxes as RSS feeds.
- lh7777 9y ago
  Newsblur (a web-based RSS reader) added a newsletter feature a while back that's pretty useful if you want to mix RSS & newsletters in the same place. Set up an email rule to automatically forward your newsletters to a custom address and Newsblur will show them as if they're another site you've subscribed to via RSS. I'm not a big fan of newsletters myself, but it's nice to be able to include those few sites that only offer newsletters in my regular news reading workflow.
alvil 9y ago
I really like the idea of RSS I just would replace it with JSON.
- yoz-y 9y ago
  I have great news for you. https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org All major readers have already added support for it too
qwerty456127 9y ago
What about Atom? Isn't it better than RSS?
b0rsuk 9y ago
For the websites that actually provide whole articles via RSS, what's your next step ? How do you keep and organize those articles ? edit: I mean how users, not article authors, keep and organize full articles.
- Artemix 9y ago
  I don't really understand your question but if you were asking about how we actually store articles and provide such a feed, I can explain how I did it. I made a markdown-based blog with the articles stored in a PgSQL database and, for now, two interfaces: the website, which I kept as lightweight as possible (no external content, no wasted space for ads etc) and a RSS feed, only experimental for now, which gives the latest articles without content (title, subtitle, dates and that's pretty much it), but I plan to give full article as a markdown article, but that'll need a bit of research (for images and such). Haven't made any way to change the query for latest articles but I'll add pagination the same way my list does it.
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    Okay, my question was ambiguous. I meant: how do users store and organize full articles from RSS feeds ? I used a RSS reader before a hard drive crash, and I made the mistake of subscribing to too many feeds. Aside from cutting unnecessary information overload, how do people organize their "old newspapers" ?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Some readers (e.g. TTRSS) have a "star" button. You can then just click on the feed or category and view only the starred items. Alternatively, you can use a separate bookmark system, like Pinboard.
satireguff 9y ago
I have used RSS/Atom feeds for ever, recently I have decided to ditch Twitter's client and for Twitter feeds consumption I am using twitrss.me to parse twitter user feeds. I need to find a good parse for FB and than I will be a happy man.
paule89 9y ago
I love RSS/ATOM. The only problem i have is with sites, that don't let me see the complete content inside feedly and i have to open the site in an extra new tab. Would love some suggestions for this. (other feedgraber, self hosted,...)
- m-localhost 9y ago
  This chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fullyfeedly/ikdncbjpcpkheefmnbicggciklkeebmp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fullyfeedly/ikdncb...
- calmchaos 9y ago
  Feedbro has built-in Readability style engine that can transform partial feeds to full feeds (you have to set it in Properties for each feed): https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
arlk 9y ago
RSS is the best to follow up with the latest news or blogs you like, yet it has some weaknesses like -I know this is the content provider's fault- not serving the full articles. That's why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves the truncated RSS articles problem.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Nothing prevents an RSS reader from fetching the linked page. I believe NewsBlur does that.
nokya 9y ago
+1 for "nothing better". I have been using RSS for years and select my sources of information depending on its availability. Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds. I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows this instead. I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads and removes any "non-content-related" stuff. I also convinced some of them to share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of "clean, ad-free" content beats anything else. Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions, notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall... In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can do that, you have your own RSS reader. Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand how to convert the 'link' in the RSS feed to a 'mobile link'. ++
KORraN 9y ago
I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say 2 hours ago. I switch to "Most Recent" and guess what, I can't find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person's page). I'm getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.
- aiNohY6g 9y ago
  You can 'easily' generate a RSS stream out of Facebook and Twitter (and many other sources), e.g. w/RSS Bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge).
- Ascetik 9y ago
  >miss Google Reader Feedly
  - nawtacawp 9y ago
    I use Reeder on my iPad and add RSS feeds individually to the app. There is a section where I can add a Feedly account to the app. Does that provide any advantages over directly adding the RSS feeds?
    - ronjouch 9y ago
      Syncing: read stuff in bed on your iPad/Reeder, get up, login to www.feedly.com and find your unread list in the same state. Other than that, feedly offers a few features you might be interested in: search, filters, alerts, highlights, etc.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.
z92 9y ago
I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single news from each site. Don't know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.
icc97 9y ago
I use Thunderbird for my email + RSS together. Somehow the three things that lots of people keep on thinking are dead or dying work perfectly together.
- a3n 9y ago
  Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" is bare-bones good enough for RSS, especially if feeds aren't going to be a conspicuous part of your online life.
  - icc97 9y ago
    I find that I read my RSS feed about as often as I check my personal email, so having the two side-by-side works quite well. I also like the separation of not having it in the browser so that I'm not tempted to read it in the middle of working.
tachaeon 9y ago
For those looking for an RSS reader for mobile that doesn’t use flashy animations and is highly customizable, I suggest checking out Newsify.
agumonkey 9y ago
any emacs user using elfeed ?
twsted 9y ago
I agree completely. It's the web at its best. There no need for a decentralized social network. We have the web. We should return using RSS (or Atom) and find some other tools to help for forums / messages. "Likes"? Are we sure we need them?
oeuviz 9y ago
>But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007! Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was json.
- OliverJones 9y ago
  So what if XML is gross? Feed generators generate it. Feed readers consume it. Computer machine language is gross too. But only some of us need to look at it, while we can all use it.
- dreamdu5t 9y ago
  XML is not just a transport encoding like JSON. Apples to oranges. They are not comparable. It’s like comparing HTML or CSS with JSON. What’s he equivalent of XPath in JSON? There isn’t! They aren’t remotely solutions to the same thing.
  - oaiey 9y ago
    This
tzahola 9y ago
Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking nonsense...
tomerbd 9y ago
I use a combination of google now + hackernews. google now - I let it do the work and suggest me what to read. hackernews - too much good stuff to miss so i read here as well.
andrewgleave 9y ago
We launched a very simple RSS to mail product last year [1] and it's uptake has been steadily growing. There's still life in the RSS ecosystem yet! [1] https://fliprss.com https://fliprss.com
eXpl0it3r 9y ago
I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative. Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit wasteful. What I'd like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification tells the RSS reader to grab the new content. Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it's the main distribution solution for podcasts.
- onli 9y ago
  RSS has that already, exactly that. It is enabled by Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), an (older?) alternative (used by Wordpress) is rsscloud.
  - breischl 9y ago
    Yep, sadly it didn't really get going until RSS was moving out of the mainstream. Really need setup, though. Just noticed that it was renamed to WebSub and adopted as a W3C standard earlier this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    PubSubHubbub (even before it became WebSub) was divorced from the original tie to Atom or RSS.
pinguinFromY 9y ago
The page has a JS miner in it.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  What a time to be alive!
- jwilk 9y ago
  Where?
- dyates 9y ago
  Yes, it's an experiment I'm running in advertising-alternative monetisation. Importantly, all mining is consensual -- the miner will only run if you open the accordion and hit Play. Not sure if I made that clear enough in the blurb itself, but it's outlined in the linked post: https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-mining/ https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-mining/ I know these things have gotten a bad rap from various shenanigans with Showtime and TPB, but on my site mining is only done with user knowledge and permission.
djhworld 9y ago
I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal. While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a 'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence summary. This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way it's delivered these days. It's fine (if a little irritating) if you are online all the time, but offline it's practically unusable bar the few sites that offer full length articles
- sonar_un 9y ago
  I also use NewsBlur as my RSS reader of choice. It's great! Truncated articles are a big problem with RSS I think. Sites are trying to get you to jump to their page so you can consume their advertisements. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect as I stop consuming the site's news and rarely click the links to the page. The small blurb for the feed doesn't give me enough information to want to jump to the page. Often, inline photos won't show up either, so I am less likely to find the article worth a visit to the page.
- OliverJones 9y ago
  Maybe what shows up in Newsblur is a "little" irritating. But trying to get the same quality of stuff from FB is just plain irritating, without qualifications.
- ojiikun 9y ago
  If you use the Android app, just pop the site into original text mode and it will attempt to prefetch the un-truncated article.
lcnmrn 9y ago
I think sub.cafe is better than RSS or Twitter, but that's just me because I created it.
sjs382 9y ago
I'm so in-the-bag for RSS that I've written scrapers to create feeds for sites that don't support RSS...
shurcooL 9y ago
I was quite excited when I heard of https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/. I was surprised at how much more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more. So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its status?
- dreamdu5t 9y ago
  XML is not a transport encoding like JSON. It is a hypermedia format that supports metadata. Even something as simple as an author attribute on a quote requires a standard on top of JSON. “I can’t parse without programming” is a terrible reason to prefer JSON.
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
Recently I was looking for an RSS reader for Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on Liferea. Does anyone have a other suggestions?
- ece 9y ago
  Not really it seems, unless you want a self-hosted solution like tt-rss, freshrss, or selfoss.
gumby 9y ago
I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a set of users/devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have, supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn't have to write any clients for looking things up. This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a commercial product a few years ago.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  This would make a great write up / blog post if you have time.
eqtn 9y ago
I was using google reader with greader app on android and after google killed it, greader switched to feedly. I imported all the feeds to feedly and continued using it with greader as if nothing happened. On other note, Feedly app is not good. An alternative for ios is reeder app
drumhead 9y ago
I've been using Sage on Firefox for the last decade. Its absolutely barebones but does the job for me. However with Firefox 57 Quantum its likely it wont be supported, so I looked at Feedly, but it was a bit too Hollywood for me. Any suggestions for something simple and clean like Sage?
dingo_bat 9y ago
Google reader. Never forget.
calmchaos 9y ago
Feedbro RSS Feed reader has built-in Rule engine that lets you define rules for filtering/highlighting/autotagging articles. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
- softwarelimits 9y ago
  With the HN feed I get this error: Unable to load feed https://news.ycombinator.com/rss: 503: Unable to read feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss That is a pitty, looks like an interesting project? Does it have an open issue tracker?
  - calmchaos 9y ago
    HN site sometimes throws that error i.e. that URL returns HTTP code 503 and no feed content. It's intermittent and not really a Feedbro bug.
consultSKI 9y ago
Love me some RSS.
hwu2whag 9y ago
Couldn't agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred the discreet version built into the OSX browser.
eikenberry 9y ago
The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?
- slipmagic 9y ago
  I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant. There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.
- smarx007 9y ago
  I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
daveheq 9y ago
RSS, like Facebook, Twitter, email, and every other way to post to people, has its own uses in it's own situations that fit best for people in those situations. I dislike people trying to say we should universally move over to one format, and prefer the formats remain and be improved for people who can best use those formats.
djhworld 9y ago
I subscribe to "Hacker Noon" RSS feed, it sometimes throws up some interesting posts, but I swear most days 90% of them seem to be about bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. Is there any content curation on hackernoon at all?
rekshaw 9y ago
May I add, RSS feeds are also exactly what makes up an Alexa special Skill type called "Flash Briefing"
pers0n 9y ago
You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option. You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails and so the $$$ comes first before anything else
grappler 9y ago
RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed. Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user. Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it. This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know of anything like it.
nreece 9y ago
Absolutely, there's nothing better! Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation & monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche industries. I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, that helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage.
asimpson 9y ago
This is why I made a service to serve up RSS feeds for Youtube channels, ytrss.co. Love live RSS! :)

640 points by dyates 9y ago

2nd RSS post today, and no mention of PubSubHubbub, aka WebSub? Or maybe it's just a low-level feature, not important enough? Strange days indeed.

_pdp_ 9y ago

Google killed the RSS feeds for me. On the flip-side, I am thinking to get back to them sometime soon.

VLM 9y ago
I was kinda worried about RSS "dying" due to google. Before google reader died I had about 140 feeds in my newsblur, right now in my newsblur tab I have 134. I'm not thinking google reader dying impacted the RSS ecosystem very much although there was a very small measurable effect.
anabisengrin 9y ago
Why do you act in such a victimized way ? You were trapped in a closed system, the trap crumbled down and now you're free. Google did not kill RSS, it killed its RSS reader and that's it. The number of websites providing an RSS feed has not declined since. I mean I really do not understand your way of thinking ? When Google is no more, will it have killed maps and videos ?
- gcgggfxsdg 9y ago
  Are you stupid, French, or both? Don’t. fucking. put. a. space. after. a. question. mark. That. is. not. English. Thanks!
mantas 9y ago
I stopped RSSing after Google Reader was gone. I started using RSS (well, whatever is left of RSS..) few months ago. Happy!
- fredley 9y ago
  I just logged into The Old Reader for the first time in a long time. What a lot of interesting stuff I used to follow.
smsm42 9y ago
When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them. Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years, nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.
- hylianwarrior 9y ago
  I came to this thread from Feedly :)
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    Same here. I follow HN FROM Feedly so I can minimize the risk of missing any post.
- corobo 9y ago
  Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely [1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles
  - pencilcode 9y ago
    I use reeder as the client, much better than feedly ‘s ui but feedly is still the backend. Working great since I came back to rss for about a year.
    - corobo 9y ago
      Thanks I'll give that a go. I am going to have so many unread articles if I get back into RSS reading hah
  - SyneRyder 9y ago

digi_owl 9y ago

Ah yes, twitter lists. It seems they came up with those to undercut the major reason people used the likes of Tweetdeck. Only to later buy up, and shut down the desktop version of, the very same client. And now it languishes in some side area of the service, seemingly forgotten.

0x006A 9y ago

so whats a good rss reader in 2017?

anabisengrin 9y ago
koffnewsbeuterkoff
subroutine 9y ago
digg reader works fine for me. screencap: http://i.imgur.com/3GbYB61.png http://i.imgur.com/3GbYB61.png link: http://digg.com/reader http://digg.com/reader
- petepete 9y ago
  I wasn't aware Digg Reader existed, thanks. Now, will my 12 year old Digg account work?
  - subroutine 9y ago
    Hah. Similar experience last year when I tried to sign up for digg reader and it said my email address was already in use O.o
renchap 9y ago
As a heavy RSS user, I really like Newsblur
- VLM 9y ago
  This discussion would be improved with pricing data. Newsblur is free, although I'm one of the 6034 premium paid users. Newsblur never fails me, kinda impressive how well it works.
fnl 9y ago
the (good) old reader and newsblur are my favorites https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ http://newsblur.com/ http://newsblur.com/

fredley 9y ago

I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter. Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now's the time.

icebraining 9y ago
I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion. By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)
- nawtacawp 9y ago
  What are you using to aggregate the feeds?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).
    - ronjouch 9y ago
      Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

fnl 9y ago

And you can push out news on RSS as they arrive, not just "weekly (newsletter) updates" or so.

tzahola 9y ago

B-but you can’t have javascript within RSS!

petepete 9y ago
Or tracking pixels! How will the marketing department cope?
- onli 9y ago
  You absolutely can have tracking pixels in RSS feeds.

tiedmann 9y ago

Wow, I wrote some code just yesterday that consumes RSS-feeds thinking I was forever alone - guess I was wrong :)

mrmondo 9y ago

I truly love RSS, combining Feedly with Reeder makes for a fantastic experience. I wrote a brief post on how I use RSS recently: https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-rss/ https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-rss/

genericacct 9y ago

Well there could be something better if someone rewrote it in JSON; but it works so it's best left untouched i guess.

pacifika 9y ago
Search for jsonfeed
pferde 9y ago
There could be something better if someone wrote a completely new format with very strict requirements. Try implementing a RSS reader that can reliably keep track of which items/articles are new, which are old but changed, which are unchanged, etc. There is enough wiggle room in both RSS and Atom specifications to make you go crazy with all the crappy half-baked feed generators out there, which unfortunately still do not run afoul of the specs, despite pulling all kinds of inconsistent crap. I don't care if it's json, xml or something completely different, as long as the specs are tight and strict.

jwilk 9y ago

Atom syndication format is better than RSS. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29

viraptor 9y ago
There's no difference in the consumption method though, is there? I kind of lump Atom and RSS together in my mind. Some of my subscribed feeds use one, some use the other, but without looking at the URL, I couldn't tell.
- onli 9y ago
  There is no practical difference at all. RSS has more mindshare outside the google universe, but all reader read both, the formats can be mapped from the one to the other, and all languages have libraries to create both. And also manually they are both equally easy to write. I for one opted to solely generate RSS wherever possible. Having two equally suited standards is a waste.
  - lifthrasiir 9y ago
    But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline. When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore updated articles. For the obvious reason (cough timely standardization cough) Atom is technically and often practically superior to the RSS family of formats (somehow not distinguished to each other). And after more than 10 years of usage, I'm pretty sure that every feed reader in the continued existence now has Atom support. [1] https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedparser/datetimes https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedpar...
    - onli 9y ago
      No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :) I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object. You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The blog engine I use has different options to handle that, I for one think just pushing a new entry with a new guid is the right solution; but then of course rss readers can't mark updates.

_up 9y ago

I wonder if "Rankings" from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back incentive to produce quality Content.

shakna 9y ago
No need to scrape: rankings are available by both APIs.
- _up 9y ago
  To clarify, HN was only meant as an example. Newspapers have kind of a ranking too. A ranking could be derived from how long and in what spot it is positioned.
r3bl 9y ago
HN API doesn't have any limitations what so ever. I'm not using its RSS, but I have a script running on my server every five minutes that sends a new push notification on my phone every time a HN story reaches 500 points. Simple and straightforward way of keeping up with the tech, made in like 40 lines of Python: https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-scripts/blob/master/hn500-to-simplepush.py https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-scripts/b...
- mrighele 9y ago
  Funny, for me 500 points would be a flag that the story is not technical enough, and probably about how the latest iPhone's UI sucks, gender inequality in SV, Google/FB/Hw manufacturer spying on our life, and many other similar topics that inevitably end up in a lot of bikeshedding

superwayne 9y ago

A friend and I made a tool/framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites that don't offer one. It's written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of code. http://github.com/nblock/feeds http://github.com/nblock/feeds

onli 9y ago
If the site is simple enough, one could also use my Yahoo Pipes revival project[0] to extract content from a page into an RSS feed. [0]: https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/
- amiraliakbari 9y ago
  The sites seems somehow immature to me. The "Shared Pipes" sections lists a few examples, but the first one returns an empty feed and the second one returns "Internal Server Error". It is probably because of the definition of the pipes being outdated, but it needs better presentation.
  - onli 9y ago
    Hi, thanks for the feedback. The first pipe is filtering for crypto currency articles on HN, right now there seems to be none with those exact keywords, I'll add some more. The second is user-provided and probably dies because of the sub-pipe, I removed my upvote - now the second one is https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx, which works fine. In general I tried to keep backwards compatiblity as much as possible, I'm only aware of one single breaking change (filter via regexpression, which was not possible for long before the syntax changed and should not have affected many pipes).

4lch3m1st 9y ago

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.

r3bl 9y ago
YouTube is very friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.
- ygra 9y ago
  ... iff you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Sorry for the repeated post, but if you have an account, you can subscribe to the channel and then get an OPML file with all the feeds from the Subscriptions Manager page.
  - bhrgunatha 9y ago
    It is a pain - I've found 3 formats for users, channels and playlists: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<user name from url> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<id from url> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id from url> I wonder if there are more?
  - 4lch3m1st 9y ago
    One quick way to do that is by using NewPipe Android app. It has an RSS feed button. Plus, you get a lightweight YouTube frontend.
- ino 9y ago

asymmetric 9y ago

I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves “stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine) I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome and didn’t always work. How do you folks solve this?

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
Personally, I just avoid such feeds. I’ve never found this problem with any high quality blogs I follow. The sites I’ve experienced this problem with most are old media companies, and they produce so much content, it’s probably best consumed via other means. It’s a shame more paywall sites don’t make their protected content available via authenticated feeds.
beefield 9y ago
I have not had time to figure out how this works, but in inoreader mobile app, you can pull down in the article stubs and quite often you get the full article downloaded directly in the app. Weirdest is that this seems to work even beyond some paywalls.
username223 9y ago
I don't mind the stubs, since they usually give me enough to know whether or not I want to read the whole article. For most sites that serve stubs, I only want to read a handful of what they publish.
hasbot 9y ago
Interestingly, many readers of /r/politics never read more than the headline anyways.
fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
tt-rss has a plug-in that lets you specify which part of the linked article is the actual content and then, when it pulls the feed, it replaces the feed content with the text of the specified element.

leejo 9y ago

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging process, it's not a way that sites can keep users hooked on the site to boost ad impressions. RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's nothing better. [1] https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/ https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/

Arnt 9y ago
What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS. Right? RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  He's partially right, the web 2.0 trend was all about interaction, "we" all believed it would be heavens on earth while we now know it's far from that and now I (we?) would love to go back to light and simple aggregation.
- barkingtoad 9y ago
  To be more exact, RSS is headline-oriented, so it's about clickbait. It is not about sharebait.
- hopesthoughts 9y ago
  Well you can still have clickbait-like headlines with RSS, but it does take the viral element away,.
matchagaucho 9y ago

sdfjkl 9y ago

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.

keypress 9y ago
Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.
- Andrenid 9y ago
  You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.
  - jojoo 9y ago
    a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head. if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.
  - keypress 9y ago
    That wasn't my point. Parent said RSS was the only sane way. Wordpress aside - email notifications can also be a 'sane' way.
amelius 9y ago
> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways. Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

h43z 9y ago

After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just have to press 'o' to open the article in my browser.

grape911 9y ago

I don't understand where this "RSS is dead" mantra came from. RSS does what it is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet. E.g. I don't have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels. Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to follow couple of pages I'm interested in: http://feed.exileed.com http://feed.exileed.com (supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other) or https://twitrss.me https://twitrss.me (Twitter only). I don't have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I'm not even talking about any news site. With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page into RSS feed. Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better. (I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is that their free plan is quite limited.)

Entangled 9y ago

The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time. It's just like an email client but just for newsletters. Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I'm now using Apple Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing. Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air. RSS is dead, long live newsletters.

dsr_ 9y ago
That is not dead which can eternal lie. I still derive significant value from Usenet. People keep saying that IRC is dead (because Slack) or that Jabber is dead (because Slack) but I use both of those daily. It's a big Internet, there's room for lots of stuff.
Simon_says 9y ago
Having a separate email for newsletters is a brilliant idea.
icebraining 9y ago
It's interesting, because that has really nothing to do with email or RSS as protocols, it's purely a social convention that daily/weekly aggregations get sent as newsletters rather than published as RSS feeds. As a counterexample, I follow Leah Neukirchen's Trivium, which is a feed that publishes a weekly post with a bunch of interesting links (mostly tech related). http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro And of course, there are tools to display emails inboxes as RSS feeds.
lh7777 9y ago
Newsblur (a web-based RSS reader) added a newsletter feature a while back that's pretty useful if you want to mix RSS & newsletters in the same place. Set up an email rule to automatically forward your newsletters to a custom address and Newsblur will show them as if they're another site you've subscribed to via RSS. I'm not a big fan of newsletters myself, but it's nice to be able to include those few sites that only offer newsletters in my regular news reading workflow.

alvil 9y ago

I really like the idea of RSS I just would replace it with JSON.

yoz-y 9y ago
I have great news for you. https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org All major readers have already added support for it too

qwerty456127 9y ago

What about Atom? Isn't it better than RSS?

b0rsuk 9y ago

For the websites that actually provide whole articles via RSS, what's your next step ? How do you keep and organize those articles ? edit: I mean how users, not article authors, keep and organize full articles.

Artemix 9y ago
I don't really understand your question but if you were asking about how we actually store articles and provide such a feed, I can explain how I did it. I made a markdown-based blog with the articles stored in a PgSQL database and, for now, two interfaces: the website, which I kept as lightweight as possible (no external content, no wasted space for ads etc) and a RSS feed, only experimental for now, which gives the latest articles without content (title, subtitle, dates and that's pretty much it), but I plan to give full article as a markdown article, but that'll need a bit of research (for images and such). Haven't made any way to change the query for latest articles but I'll add pagination the same way my list does it.
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  Okay, my question was ambiguous. I meant: how do users store and organize full articles from RSS feeds ? I used a RSS reader before a hard drive crash, and I made the mistake of subscribing to too many feeds. Aside from cutting unnecessary information overload, how do people organize their "old newspapers" ?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Some readers (e.g. TTRSS) have a "star" button. You can then just click on the feed or category and view only the starred items. Alternatively, you can use a separate bookmark system, like Pinboard.

satireguff 9y ago

I have used RSS/Atom feeds for ever, recently I have decided to ditch Twitter's client and for Twitter feeds consumption I am using twitrss.me to parse twitter user feeds. I need to find a good parse for FB and than I will be a happy man.

paule89 9y ago

I love RSS/ATOM. The only problem i have is with sites, that don't let me see the complete content inside feedly and i have to open the site in an extra new tab. Would love some suggestions for this. (other feedgraber, self hosted,...)

m-localhost 9y ago
This chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fullyfeedly/ikdncbjpcpkheefmnbicggciklkeebmp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fullyfeedly/ikdncb...
calmchaos 9y ago
Feedbro has built-in Readability style engine that can transform partial feeds to full feeds (you have to set it in Properties for each feed): https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

arlk 9y ago

RSS is the best to follow up with the latest news or blogs you like, yet it has some weaknesses like -I know this is the content provider's fault- not serving the full articles. That's why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves the truncated RSS articles problem.

icebraining 9y ago
Nothing prevents an RSS reader from fetching the linked page. I believe NewsBlur does that.

nokya 9y ago

+1 for "nothing better". I have been using RSS for years and select my sources of information depending on its availability. Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds. I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows this instead. I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads and removes any "non-content-related" stuff. I also convinced some of them to share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of "clean, ad-free" content beats anything else. Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions, notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall... In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can do that, you have your own RSS reader. Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand how to convert the 'link' in the RSS feed to a 'mobile link'. ++

KORraN 9y ago

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say 2 hours ago. I switch to "Most Recent" and guess what, I can't find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person's page). I'm getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.

aiNohY6g 9y ago
You can 'easily' generate a RSS stream out of Facebook and Twitter (and many other sources), e.g. w/RSS Bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge).
Ascetik 9y ago
>miss Google Reader Feedly
- nawtacawp 9y ago
  I use Reeder on my iPad and add RSS feeds individually to the app. There is a section where I can add a Feedly account to the app. Does that provide any advantages over directly adding the RSS feeds?
  - ronjouch 9y ago
    Syncing: read stuff in bed on your iPad/Reeder, get up, login to www.feedly.com and find your unread list in the same state. Other than that, feedly offers a few features you might be interested in: search, filters, alerts, highlights, etc.
- tzahola 9y ago
  Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

z92 9y ago

I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single news from each site. Don't know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.

icc97 9y ago

I use Thunderbird for my email + RSS together. Somehow the three things that lots of people keep on thinking are dead or dying work perfectly together.

a3n 9y ago
Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" is bare-bones good enough for RSS, especially if feeds aren't going to be a conspicuous part of your online life.
- icc97 9y ago
  I find that I read my RSS feed about as often as I check my personal email, so having the two side-by-side works quite well. I also like the separation of not having it in the browser so that I'm not tempted to read it in the middle of working.

tachaeon 9y ago

For those looking for an RSS reader for mobile that doesn’t use flashy animations and is highly customizable, I suggest checking out Newsify.

agumonkey 9y ago

any emacs user using elfeed ?

twsted 9y ago

I agree completely. It's the web at its best. There no need for a decentralized social network. We have the web. We should return using RSS (or Atom) and find some other tools to help for forums / messages. "Likes"? Are we sure we need them?

oeuviz 9y ago

>But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007! Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was json.

OliverJones 9y ago
So what if XML is gross? Feed generators generate it. Feed readers consume it. Computer machine language is gross too. But only some of us need to look at it, while we can all use it.
dreamdu5t 9y ago
XML is not just a transport encoding like JSON. Apples to oranges. They are not comparable. It’s like comparing HTML or CSS with JSON. What’s he equivalent of XPath in JSON? There isn’t! They aren’t remotely solutions to the same thing.
- oaiey 9y ago
  This

tzahola 9y ago

Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking nonsense...

tomerbd 9y ago

I use a combination of google now + hackernews. google now - I let it do the work and suggest me what to read. hackernews - too much good stuff to miss so i read here as well.

andrewgleave 9y ago

We launched a very simple RSS to mail product last year [1] and it's uptake has been steadily growing. There's still life in the RSS ecosystem yet! [1] https://fliprss.com https://fliprss.com

eXpl0it3r 9y ago

I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative. Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit wasteful. What I'd like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification tells the RSS reader to grab the new content. Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it's the main distribution solution for podcasts.

onli 9y ago
RSS has that already, exactly that. It is enabled by Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), an (older?) alternative (used by Wordpress) is rsscloud.
- breischl 9y ago
  Yep, sadly it didn't really get going until RSS was moving out of the mainstream. Really need setup, though. Just noticed that it was renamed to WebSub and adopted as a W3C standard earlier this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  PubSubHubbub (even before it became WebSub) was divorced from the original tie to Atom or RSS.

pinguinFromY 9y ago

The page has a JS miner in it.

Bromskloss 9y ago
What a time to be alive!
jwilk 9y ago
Where?
dyates 9y ago
Yes, it's an experiment I'm running in advertising-alternative monetisation. Importantly, all mining is consensual -- the miner will only run if you open the accordion and hit Play. Not sure if I made that clear enough in the blurb itself, but it's outlined in the linked post: https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-mining/ https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-mining/ I know these things have gotten a bad rap from various shenanigans with Showtime and TPB, but on my site mining is only done with user knowledge and permission.

djhworld 9y ago

I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal. While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a 'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence summary. This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way it's delivered these days. It's fine (if a little irritating) if you are online all the time, but offline it's practically unusable bar the few sites that offer full length articles

sonar_un 9y ago
I also use NewsBlur as my RSS reader of choice. It's great! Truncated articles are a big problem with RSS I think. Sites are trying to get you to jump to their page so you can consume their advertisements. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect as I stop consuming the site's news and rarely click the links to the page. The small blurb for the feed doesn't give me enough information to want to jump to the page. Often, inline photos won't show up either, so I am less likely to find the article worth a visit to the page.
OliverJones 9y ago
Maybe what shows up in Newsblur is a "little" irritating. But trying to get the same quality of stuff from FB is just plain irritating, without qualifications.
ojiikun 9y ago
If you use the Android app, just pop the site into original text mode and it will attempt to prefetch the un-truncated article.

lcnmrn 9y ago

I think sub.cafe is better than RSS or Twitter, but that's just me because I created it.

sjs382 9y ago

I'm so in-the-bag for RSS that I've written scrapers to create feeds for sites that don't support RSS...

shurcooL 9y ago

I was quite excited when I heard of https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/. I was surprised at how much more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more. So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its status?

dreamdu5t 9y ago
XML is not a transport encoding like JSON. It is a hypermedia format that supports metadata. Even something as simple as an author attribute on a quote requires a standard on top of JSON. “I can’t parse without programming” is a terrible reason to prefer JSON.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

Recently I was looking for an RSS reader for Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on Liferea. Does anyone have a other suggestions?

ece 9y ago
Not really it seems, unless you want a self-hosted solution like tt-rss, freshrss, or selfoss.

gumby 9y ago

I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a set of users/devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have, supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn't have to write any clients for looking things up. This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a commercial product a few years ago.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
This would make a great write up / blog post if you have time.

eqtn 9y ago

I was using google reader with greader app on android and after google killed it, greader switched to feedly. I imported all the feeds to feedly and continued using it with greader as if nothing happened. On other note, Feedly app is not good. An alternative for ios is reeder app

drumhead 9y ago

I've been using Sage on Firefox for the last decade. Its absolutely barebones but does the job for me. However with Firefox 57 Quantum its likely it wont be supported, so I looked at Feedly, but it was a bit too Hollywood for me. Any suggestions for something simple and clean like Sage?

dingo_bat 9y ago

Google reader. Never forget.

calmchaos 9y ago

Feedbro RSS Feed reader has built-in Rule engine that lets you define rules for filtering/highlighting/autotagging articles. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

softwarelimits 9y ago
With the HN feed I get this error: Unable to load feed https://news.ycombinator.com/rss: 503: Unable to read feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss That is a pitty, looks like an interesting project? Does it have an open issue tracker?
- calmchaos 9y ago
  HN site sometimes throws that error i.e. that URL returns HTTP code 503 and no feed content. It's intermittent and not really a Feedbro bug.

consultSKI 9y ago

Love me some RSS.

hwu2whag 9y ago

Couldn't agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred the discreet version built into the OSX browser.

eikenberry 9y ago

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?

slipmagic 9y ago
I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant. There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.
smarx007 9y ago
I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

daveheq 9y ago

RSS, like Facebook, Twitter, email, and every other way to post to people, has its own uses in it's own situations that fit best for people in those situations. I dislike people trying to say we should universally move over to one format, and prefer the formats remain and be improved for people who can best use those formats.

djhworld 9y ago

I subscribe to "Hacker Noon" RSS feed, it sometimes throws up some interesting posts, but I swear most days 90% of them seem to be about bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. Is there any content curation on hackernoon at all?

rekshaw 9y ago

May I add, RSS feeds are also exactly what makes up an Alexa special Skill type called "Flash Briefing"

pers0n 9y ago

You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option. You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails and so the $$$ comes first before anything else

grappler 9y ago

RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed. Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user. Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it. This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know of anything like it.

nreece 9y ago

Absolutely, there's nothing better! Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation & monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche industries. I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, that helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage.

asimpson 9y ago

This is why I made a service to serve up RSS feeds for Youtube channels, ytrss.co. Love live RSS! :)