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> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the la
by skrause 8y ago
> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well.
After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way, I'm using Inoreader every day.
- tunesmith 8y agoA site should still be able to choose to not produce RSS if they don't want. Encouraging RSS is different than forcing RSS feeds on sites that don't want them.
- catach 8y agoSite creators have the freedom to produce what they want, and users likewise have the freedom to consume how they want.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoDo they? I'm fairly certain they don't. Otherwise everyone would just be torrenting and stripping commercials.
- catach 8y agoSure, as a broad absolutist statement there's plenty of practical, legal, metaphysical holes you could poke in it. Not aware of any anti-user-made RSS laws, though.
- evrydayhustling 8y agoTorrenting is illegal because you (generally) weren't authorized to make a copy. Stripping commercials isn't because you're removing something, or changing the way you read it. There might be some legal case if you have to make another copy of media in order to alter your consumption, but thank God I'm aware of no case attempting to control your personal use of media. (DMCA doesn't count, it's about circumventing things that prevent you from copying, not change your consumption.)
- Izkata 8y agoJust to this point, an example: My parents' VCR had a built-in feature that would automatically fast-forward through commercials when playing back something that it recorded.
- franzpeterstein 8y agoI think so too. I use RSS as a very minimalist blog and have had good experiences with it so far. It's hard to monetize the format, but it really draws a lot of people to my side.
- jessriedel 8y agoFor reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a kindle book. Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all posts the author would like to make public, regardless of how many are new to the reader. This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts. (The single RSS file on my blog takes up the majority of my bandwidth costs.) RSS needs to be replaced, not revived.
- Tehdasi 8y agoSortof, if you are reading via a web based reader, the service itself only reads the feed once, and the users view the cached version.
- jessriedel 8y agoYou mean the fact that aggregators like The Old Reader just download the RSS file from the website periodically, and then serve up cached copies to their many user? True, although this is another way of saying that some of the value added by aggregators only exists by virtue of the terrible design of RSS.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoIt might be construed as a feature, since a blog can consist of simply static files, no need for running any code relating to RSS.
- jessriedel 8y agoIt doesn't need code. Just a static text file with a list of publication dates and URLs, each of which points to static HTML file for each publicly available posts. Then each user could check the list and download only what's new, without needing an aggregator. Users would never need to download the same content twice.
- eli 8y agoThere are a few of those: http://www.feedsapi.com/ http://www.feedsapi.com/ and http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
- onli 8y agoIf I may add mine: https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/. It allows creating feeds for sites if the site is structured enough, and the feed can then manipulated with other blocks, similar to how Yahoo Pipes worked.
- rolandog 8y agoI miss Yahoo Pipes so much! Thanks for creating this service, I'll try it out soon and leave some feedback here!
- m-localhost 8y agoOne of the few Yahoo products that were great. I think Yahoo was pretty good in providing developer tools and apis.
- onli 8y agoFeedback is always welcome (and subscribers even more ;) ), you can also send me a mail (in profile) or follow the way described in the docs to reach me (https://www.pipes.digital/docs#support https://www.pipes.digital/docs#support).
- theDoug 8y agoI was hoping for the same. Still see no answer on how this does anything to support their claim that "It’s time to turn the tide"
- simplify 8y agoMarketing is a powerful force. It's true that RSS has existed for many years, but also consider how many people have grown up without learning about it.
- iuguy 8y agoSome other people had mentioned some services available but I'd like to add self-hosted options https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge and https://github.com/taroved/pol https://github.com/taroved/pol into the mix. I use rss-bridge in combination with rss2email to follow instagram feeds after leaving instagram.
- stevewillows 8y agoI use http://feed43.com http://feed43.com for this. Its nice because you can create your own standard for the output.
- zbentley 8y agoThat's because rendering JS/CSS/whatever has become the norm. It has become the norm for two reasons: tooling for building "static" sites with this technology has gotten very popular and well-done, and sites with a vested (advertising/lockin) interest in showing their content "their way" have jumped on board.
- nreece 8y ago* Shameless plug *: Our little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, via an online feed builder and REST API. Custom feeds can even be created for dynamic content, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering, and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.
- tschellenbach 8y agoThat's awesome, I'll start making a little list of tools that help you do more with RSS
- saamm 8y agoYou may also be interested in Kill the Newsletter: https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/ (I think a fellow HN user made it? Can't remember)
- O_H_E 8y agoReally Nice
- Bromskloss 8y agoFor those wondering: The least expensive plan is 9 USD per month for 20 feeds, 10 simultaneous articles per feed, and updates every 6 hours.
- m-localhost 8y agoHere is another feed creator service, for websites that don't offer a newsfeed: http://createfeed.wprssaggregator.com/ http://createfeed.wprssaggregator.com/
- superwayne 8y agoIf you don't mind writing a bit of Python glue code, you can also use https://github.com/nblock/feeds https://github.com/nblock/feeds (I'm one of the authors). It uses Scrapy under the hood and is supposed to run as a cronjob. It will create full text Atom feeds of whatever data you will feed to it. Spiders (plugins) are usually quite small, especially when there is no login (paywall) involved: https://github.com/nblock/feeds/tree/master/feeds/spiders https://github.com/nblock/feeds/tree/master/feeds/spiders