4 ms·

Simple: - most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of

Simple: - most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of their older posts. Imagine a blog that has one seriously good article once a month. Typically you can't get more than a year's worth of posts, so that's like 12 articles. Why? - the best RSS app I had on iPad let me archive feeds for a LONG time. I used it as a kind of a library. Returned to articles many times (philosophy and such). Most RSS readers out there have ZERO functionality in terms of archiving content indefinitely. (meaning : they typically have some leeway in max articles stored, or how old to archive feeds.. but you know you simply can not realy on the app to save your favorite articels, at some point they will be deleted). - inability to highlight text. Again, if I read something I want to be able to at least highlight some text. Most RSS readers don't do this. Instead RSS readers do the same thing every other RSS reader does. Basically, it's like the developers of RSS apps think that the only purpose of retrieving articles is for fueling some kind of "feed" addiction. Like the only purpose of content on the web is to satisfy an urge to quick scan and move to the nex article. It's like the devs of RSS apps are so drugged out themselves in this day and age of short attention span, that they can't envision other uses for a feed reader than satisfying this urge for the daily/hourly doses of "novelty". Click click click. Swipe swipe swipe. /rant off

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tannhaeuser 8y ago
You're free to develop an RSS reader with those features yourself. RSS is - on paper - an extremely simple protocol, but since many feeds are broken (not wellformed/improperly escaped XML, often incompetently copied from HTML, with spam, etc. etc.), RSS readers must integrate individual feeds almost on a case-by-case basis, with feed-specific fixes and heuristics. And there goes your project budget. Considering RSS isn't exactly growing (because the number of valuable news site isn't neither), the state of RSS is as good or bad as it always has been. I don't know if that is actually a good thing, because when big media (Google) last turned their eye towards it, it monopolized and almost ruined it.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  You're free to develop an RSS reader "Free to" != "Capable of" It's that kind of attitude that keeps Linux from going mainstream, too. This is a user complaining about user issues, and the response is "do it yourself." It is both not helpful, and condescending.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jamesgeck0 8y ago
> - most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of their older posts. Imagine a blog that has one seriously good article once a month. Typically you can't get more than a year's worth of posts, so that's like 12 articles. Why? Most blogs don't include more than the last ten or so articles in their feed. Fetching backlogs of posts is beyond the scope of RSS. Unless you're complaining that posts you've already downloaded aren't persisted indefinitely?
- bscphil 8y ago
  This seems like the sort of thing that should be in the spec for a feed. RSS is basically a textual representation of a site's available articles; you have to explicitly GET the feed to see any new posts (at least without PubSub). If you're going to provide a static xml representation of your site's content, there's no obvious reason why you wouldn't want that to extend back indefinitely. Something like feed.xml?page=2 seems fairly sane.
  - cyborgx7 8y ago
    By looking into Podlove[1] I stumbled onto a specification[2] by the IETF for just that. It doesn't seem to have much support though, neither on the feed creator, nor the client side. [1] https://podlove.org/paged-feeds/ https://podlove.org/paged-feeds/ [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
burkaman 8y ago
https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ has long (I think indefinite?) history, text highlighting, a starring system and built-in integration with Pocket/Pinboard/Evernote/whatever. Keep in mind your history issue is often the fault of the feed, not the reader. If you subscribe to a new blog that only has a year's worth of posts in its feed, then that's what you get. The reader can't proactively follow every blog in the world just in case someone subscribes in 3 years and wants to see the full history.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tannhaeuser 8y ago

You're free to develop an RSS reader with those features yourself. RSS is - on paper - an extremely simple protocol, but since many feeds are broken (not wellformed/improperly escaped XML, often incompetently copied from HTML, with spam, etc. etc.), RSS readers must integrate individual feeds almost on a case-by-case basis, with feed-specific fixes and heuristics. And there goes your project budget. Considering RSS isn't exactly growing (because the number of valuable news site isn't neither), the state of RSS is as good or bad as it always has been. I don't know if that is actually a good thing, because when big media (Google) last turned their eye towards it, it monopolized and almost ruined it.

reaperducer 8y ago
You're free to develop an RSS reader "Free to" != "Capable of" It's that kind of attitude that keeps Linux from going mainstream, too. This is a user complaining about user issues, and the response is "do it yourself." It is both not helpful, and condescending.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

jamesgeck0 8y ago

> - most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of their older posts. Imagine a blog that has one seriously good article once a month. Typically you can't get more than a year's worth of posts, so that's like 12 articles. Why? Most blogs don't include more than the last ten or so articles in their feed. Fetching backlogs of posts is beyond the scope of RSS. Unless you're complaining that posts you've already downloaded aren't persisted indefinitely?

bscphil 8y ago
This seems like the sort of thing that should be in the spec for a feed. RSS is basically a textual representation of a site's available articles; you have to explicitly GET the feed to see any new posts (at least without PubSub). If you're going to provide a static xml representation of your site's content, there's no obvious reason why you wouldn't want that to extend back indefinitely. Something like feed.xml?page=2 seems fairly sane.
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  By looking into Podlove[1] I stumbled onto a specification[2] by the IETF for just that. It doesn't seem to have much support though, neither on the feed creator, nor the client side. [1] https://podlove.org/paged-feeds/ https://podlove.org/paged-feeds/ [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

burkaman 8y ago

https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ has long (I think indefinite?) history, text highlighting, a starring system and built-in integration with Pocket/Pinboard/Evernote/whatever. Keep in mind your history issue is often the fault of the feed, not the reader. If you subscribe to a new blog that only has a year's worth of posts in its feed, then that's what you get. The reader can't proactively follow every blog in the world just in case someone subscribes in 3 years and wants to see the full history.