4 ms·

> But people who don't use the right aggregators will not be able to read past 10 posts. I do not think such aggregators exist, and you can just ignore people

by gkya 8y ago

> But people who don't use the right aggregators will not be able to read past 10 posts. I do not think such aggregators exist, and you can just ignore people using software that do not comply to widespread conventions. > And if everyone was using aggregators, I wouldn't have such a high bandwidth bill. I don't understand this sentence. All RSS client software is called aggregator. > But sites that can have an RSS feed necessarily need to deliver their content in a static form. Not really. Many websites which are essentially blogs are transforming themselves into single-page web apps. My uni's websites included. Some do it for the $$$, some for reasons that I can not know (jumping the bandwagons with minds toggled off). You can just set your blog software to truncate your feeds to a reasonable number w/o any worries. And I suggest you look at your logs, because some silly bots might be consuming your bandwith along with your normal traffic; there are some that like RSS feeds.

jessriedel 8y ago
> I don't understand this sentence. All RSS client software is called aggregator I'm trying to distinguish between (1) people using software the directly downloads the RSS feed from my website to their device and (2) people who use services that download the RSS feed to a server which can then serve a cached copy of the posts to many users. If everyone used (2), then I would only have my RSS file downloaded as many times as there are separate services, which is not very many. So apparently many people are doing (1), and if my feed is short then they are limited in the blog history they can read to how long they've personally been subscribed (or less, if they need to clear their device and can't re-download my old posts). > Not really. Many websites which are essentially blogs are transforming themselves into single-page web apps That's why I specified "But sites that can have an RSS feed...". If you have an RSS feed with useful posts in the feed, then you must be delivering static pages. (If you're just delivering snippets with links to a dynamic page, then there is no way for any service to cache the page either.) So my question is: why isn't there software to scrape webpages of blogs that offer an RSS feed with complete posts? This would enable me to comveneiently read post history going back more than 10 posts. > And I suggest you look at your logs, because some silly bots might be consuming your bandwith along with your normal traffic; there are some that like RSS feeds. All the bots put together make up 27% of my bandwidth. It's a lot, but it's not the root cause.
- gkya 8y ago
  > So apparently many people are doing (1), and if my feed is short then they are limited in the blog history they can read to how long they've personally been subscribed (or less, if they need to clear their device and can't re-download my old posts). RSS is a means for people to follow new posts from you, in order to read new posts they are supposed to come to your blog and use your archives.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    The whole point of this subthread is about reading archives offline, and how RSS can't manage this. From my first comment: > 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...
    - gkya 8y ago
      > The whole point of this subthread is about reading archives offline, and how RSS can't manage this. From my first comment: I don't think so, but maybe I missed. It is not the purpose of RSS anyways, though. RSS is for me to know when you post something new.

by gkya 8y ago

jessriedel 8y ago

> I don't understand this sentence. All RSS client software is called aggregator I'm trying to distinguish between (1) people using software the directly downloads the RSS feed from my website to their device and (2) people who use services that download the RSS feed to a server which can then serve a cached copy of the posts to many users. If everyone used (2), then I would only have my RSS file downloaded as many times as there are separate services, which is not very many. So apparently many people are doing (1), and if my feed is short then they are limited in the blog history they can read to how long they've personally been subscribed (or less, if they need to clear their device and can't re-download my old posts). > Not really. Many websites which are essentially blogs are transforming themselves into single-page web apps That's why I specified "But sites that can have an RSS feed...". If you have an RSS feed with useful posts in the feed, then you must be delivering static pages. (If you're just delivering snippets with links to a dynamic page, then there is no way for any service to cache the page either.) So my question is: why isn't there software to scrape webpages of blogs that offer an RSS feed with complete posts? This would enable me to comveneiently read post history going back more than 10 posts. > And I suggest you look at your logs, because some silly bots might be consuming your bandwith along with your normal traffic; there are some that like RSS feeds. All the bots put together make up 27% of my bandwidth. It's a lot, but it's not the root cause.

gkya 8y ago
> So apparently many people are doing (1), and if my feed is short then they are limited in the blog history they can read to how long they've personally been subscribed (or less, if they need to clear their device and can't re-download my old posts). RSS is a means for people to follow new posts from you, in order to read new posts they are supposed to come to your blog and use your archives.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  The whole point of this subthread is about reading archives offline, and how RSS can't manage this. From my first comment: > 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...
  - gkya 8y ago
    > The whole point of this subthread is about reading archives offline, and how RSS can't manage this. From my first comment: I don't think so, but maybe I missed. It is not the purpose of RSS anyways, though. RSS is for me to know when you post something new.