21 ms·

Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

904 points by kevq 7y ago

bhhaskin 7y ago
Yes please. We need to keep the web open and federated.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Fogest 7y ago
Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.
- nickthegreek 7y ago
  looks like he added a link to his RSS (https://kevq.uk/feed https://kevq.uk/feed) at the end of the article, but like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.
  - Fogest 7y ago
    Yeah I saw the link there but unfortunately that is not very helpful as if he isn't doing that on every single article you'll have a hard time finding it.
  - Deimorz 7y ago
    It's because he doesn't have one of the rel="alternate" tags that RSS readers look for: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting... (not sure why this MDN page is marked as "obsolete").
    - type0 7y ago
      Maybe because mozilla removed built in rss support from firefox?
      - notriddle 7y ago
        That and Firefox never made it particularly easy to find, and even if you notice it, you might not know how to trigger their auto-detection. In any case, I sent him an email with info on how to add it.
      - kgwxd 7y ago
        That's not a Firefox thing, all RSS readers look for that. It's what allows you to paste the url from, say, a YouTube channel and the reader is able to find the feed for that channel without knowing anything about how YouTube fashions their rss urls.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Without that manually added link in the one article, there's no way to locate his feed. His blog could have been one of the ones he's complaining about.
- itsjloh 7y ago
  Exactly! I wonder if this is the reason behind them not being able to find a lot of the RSS feeds originally.
sylk 7y ago
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
- dewey 7y ago
  Luckily some readers also include a "always fetch full content" feature that pulls the linked page and runs it through a "reader mode" to remove the garbage. These kind of feeds really annoy me.
- shakna 7y ago
  A bit of that is that RSS simply doesn't have great character support. You have to escape a whole bunch of stuff that is useful to have in the final product - because for most users the RSS is a notification feed, not the endpoint they go to.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  If the site is ad supported I can see why they're doing it. Can't serve ads in the RSS feed (some RSS readers reserve that right for themselves).
  - crtasm 7y ago
    You can use basic HTML and embed images, there's nothing stopping you putting adverts in a feed.
- k1m 7y ago
  I work on a project that can transform many of those feeds into full-text versions: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
- cytzol 7y ago
  > I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow set of HTML allowed in the <description> tag, I don't have anything in there and just have a link to my site. There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.
bad_user 7y ago
I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website generator like Jekyll or equivalent. Some of them don't have RSS feeds. But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed. Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but any one will do. Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional. And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the <head> of all your pages, like: <link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml"> [1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed [2] https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml
- alexott 7y ago
  From my experience (as maintainer of a Planet Clojure), some sites have feeds, but simply don’t expose them via links or meta. I’m usually trying some standard paths before contacting author: /rss/, /feed/, /atom.xml, etc.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  If you want to go the extra mile... For blogs that are open source, as many GitHub Pages are, you could even submit a pull request to add the RSS feed! Or write up a blog post of how to add an RSS feed to Jekyll site and submit a ticket w/ the link to your post.
gjstein 7y ago
Easy enough to support this article; RSS is good for the open web and relatively trivial to support: took me maybe an hour for my personal blog, compared to the enormous effort I've put into CSS and formatting for the website proper. I'd love to get a feeling for how many folks here have a blog with RSS support and what the relative level of traffic is between RSS and other forms of traffic. Does anyone have statistics they'd care to share?
Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago
Totally! It makes content so easy to track. I try to use Twitter a little bit for this, but most accounts post lots of other tweets in addition to "new post", so I have to spend time trying to guess which hashtags they might use to denote actual posts. Separately, I really like JSONFeed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed. It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on more.
kgwxd 7y ago
I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place. I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't generally allow ads and tracking to be added.
  - notriddle 7y ago
    Anything that allows you to post arbitrary content can support ads. [This comment was brought to you by https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/, the more exclusive alternative to The Orange Site! Ask for an invite in IRC.]
    - minikites 7y ago
      I think this is what John Gruber does for the Daring Fireball RSS feed.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Does Lobsters have some sort of comment cross-posting feature now?
  - kgwxd 7y ago
    I don't think that's it. Almost every major site has RSS, but it's usually just headlines, which I think is fine.
- sys_64738 7y ago
  I use RSS for everything and anything which isn't an RSS feed gets ignored. Life is too short.
SamWhited 7y ago
Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should feel bad if you're using) finally added RSS feeds, but I still have to try and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.
- julien 7y ago
  Medium has RSS feeds for pretty much everything, from users to tags to publications, to tags in a publications, to stories clapped on by a given user....
  - SamWhited 7y ago
    yes, that's what I said. For the longest time they only had comments though and not the posts themselves (or at least, they didn't advertise it if they already did). Now they have it but they don't have a proper meta tag and they don't link to it anywhere that I can find.
- benoliver999 7y ago
  For instance, it took me a while to find the feed of the site in the site linked. It's in the post, but if you go to the home page it is tricky to find.
- jeena 7y ago
  I have the problem that those meta links are kind of useless nowadays because Firefox removed the possibility to use Navigator.registerContentHandler() so I could redirect from the Feed button in the Firefox UI to TT-RSS. Now the button in the UI let's me download the Feed resource which doesn't make sense.
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    I believe the rss:// protocol could (still can?) be used to shell out to your reader.
danShumway 7y ago
Curiosity question, will most modern RSS-readers be able to find an RSS link on their own, or is it a good idea for me to include a link on a homepage that users can copy-paste? I've never advertised any of my rss feeds, I just leave them up at <domain>/rss.xml. I was under the impression that RSS feed locations were mostly standardized, but I'm noticing that the feed location for this blog is at a different URL.
- dewey 7y ago
  Usually they are able to find it, I never had the problem that it couldn't be found if there was a feed URL in the source code. (Using the selfhosted version of Miniflux). It's too bad that browsers removed the RSS icon in the URL bar.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  You need to advertise it in the head section of your html. Then any reader will find it.
- Deimorz 7y ago
  They should be able to find it as long as you have a <link> or <a> tag with the correct attributes/values on them. See this section and the one below it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
- rsscircus 7y ago
  An RSS link on homepage AND a RSS Autodiscovery link in the source code is for me the best solution. RSS Autodiscovery make it discoverable by any RSS reader
AndrewStephens 7y ago
I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging. It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then. In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see it return. Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was RSS[0]. [0] https://sheep.horse/rss.xml https://sheep.horse/rss.xml
- smush 7y ago
  > In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/ I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the same.
  - spiderfarmer 7y ago
    That’s one of the reasons I have Telemetry turned on. Just to show what I am using, so there’s less reasons to remove something.
    - choward 7y ago
      Do you think that's what telemetry is actually used for?
      - apetresc 7y ago
        ...yes?
  - orf 7y ago
    Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.
simplecomplex 7y ago
Yeah, and please link to it so my feed reader can pick it up from the URL.
baal80spam 7y ago
I love RSS so much. I use inoreader but there are many free RSS readers available (like feedly). I don't subscribe to anything via any other means - RSS completely covers my daily news needs. Please keep it alive!
drinchev 7y ago
Funny story. Most blogs I follow via my Reeder [0] ( actually best app I've ever used for (i|mac)OS ... no, I'm not affiliated with the app ) are ones that end up on HN. It's funny but my RSS feed currently is 30% HN / 30% Media websites like The Guardian / 40% Other. Since a year or two I rarely add new sources to my feed, which I feel it's sad. 0: https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com
snazz 7y ago
Is it just Jekyll or do most static site generators include an RSS link in their default templates?
- OrgNet 7y ago
  Hugo does too
jandrese 7y ago
RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
- notriddle 7y ago
  RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There is no “walled garden” around Apple’s podcast. They crawl and index RSS feeds just like Google crawls web pages. Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website. You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url. On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use. If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.
    - jeffchien 7y ago
      I think you are currently right, but that's probably ending soon as Apple looks to fund their own exclusive podcasts too [1]. I hope podcasters and their cooperatives/companies can resist the siren call. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fund-exclusive-podcasts-to-challenge-spotify/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fun...
      - scarface74 7y ago
        I would be okay with that if Apple introduced a standard in the RSS feed that allowed subscription, paid for podcasts that worked across apps. I’m all for a business model that lets me give companies money and they give me stuff as opposed to advertising.
latexr 7y ago
> But I was surprised to learn that many of the blogs that Jan had linked to didn't support RSS. I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from the home URL. Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no reference to it. If I didn’t think it odd that the author wasn’t providing a feed, I wouldn’t have found it. Blog platforms tend to provide support for RSS feeds because blog platforms are built by people who care about such things, so even if the writer doesn’t care, the feed will be there. I’m more worried about the lack of RSS support in big popular platforms that have no reason to not provide one, such as the News page on the Epic Games Store[3]. [1]: It may be that some were auto-generated and provided wrong info; I didn’t verify them in depth. [2]: https://www.reederapp.com/ https://www.reederapp.com/ [3]: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news
- Deimorz 7y ago
  I think he doesn't know how the automatic discovery of RSS feeds works, and just looks for a visual link to one. Like you said, he missed a lot of them, and isn't linking to his own feed properly on his site so that RSS readers can find it (with rel="alternate" and/or type="application/rss+xml").
bovermyer 7y ago
If you use Hugo, here's how to add an RSS link to your site. Just add the following to your <head> area in your template(s): {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "rss" -}} {{ printf `<link rel="%s" type="%s" href="%s" title="%s" />` .Rel .MediaType.Type .Permalink $.Site.Title | safeHTML }} {{ end -}} Related link: https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout
jdofaz 7y ago
Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS. They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not available on Apple News"
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  They were just trying to make it user friendly because they know everyone really wants to go to Apple News instead. /s
- freehunter 7y ago
  iOS these days has a major problem of allowing webpages to redirect automatically to the app or worse, to the App Store. Every now and again I have to fight Amazon to let me open a link in Safari instead of the Amazon app. Generally it's because I cannot purchase the item inside of the app (digital content like movies and Kindle books), but they still automatically open the app and make me do a dance to get it in Safari. Same thing with Yelp, under no circumstances am I ever able to get a Yelp link to open on their website. YouTube does the same thing, and I've had Gmail do it a few times too. It's one thing to show a banner at the top letting me know you have an app. But I never want to be directed from Safari into an app. If I wanted to use the app, I'd have opened the app. Since I'm in Safari, it means I want to use the web site.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Why have the apps installed at all? There is nothing I can do in the apps that I can’t do on the websites. Usually the apps are worse.
    - mcgrath_sh 7y ago
      Watching ESPN in the browser is a worse experience than ESPN’s app. I have the app on my phone for this. There are reasons to have apps on a phone. That said, it is infuriating that when I click an ESPN link on twitter, it opens in the ESPN app and not a web browser.
robmoorman 7y ago
Yes fully agree, rss is (still) a very nice way in providing structured content.
tschellenbach 7y ago
If you want to contribute to help create a consumer-grade RSS reading experience: https://github.com/getstream/winds https://github.com/getstream/winds I think part of the problem is that there are no RSS readers that try to appeal to a mainstream user audience. They are all tailored to power users.
velcrovan 7y ago
Just the other day I wrote an RSS (well, Atom) feed generator for my site in Racket: https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f
djhworld 7y ago
I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice (newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before heading home. Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article. I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow. A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS feed for my client to subscribe to. I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal implications of it
- MapleWalnut 7y ago
  That's a great idea. I would definitely use a service like that.
  - djhworld 7y ago
    I think other people in this thread are running services that do a similar thing. My crisis of conscience was around storing the full text of the articles on my own server and then presenting them as a new feed on my domain, e.g. https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml Everything in the feed is that gets generated is exactly the same as the original feed (canonical link to the actual article, publsh date, author etc) the only difference was the text in the body of each entry.
    - WiseWeasel 7y ago
      It's likely that unless you can claim status as a library or some other exception to copyright protections, as a commercial entity providing that service without compensating publishers, such a straightforward violation would get a bunch of takedown requests and eventual lawsuits for failure to respond to those requests, along with more suits if publishers have no easy way of opting out. As a personal tool you built for yourself and your friend(s) nerdy enough to understand it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as no search engines index your site and no one finds out about it.
sonicrocketman 7y ago
Widespread RSS support is crucial to pushing the open web forward and allowing the ecosystem to compete with mainstream social networks. RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling. Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t have is an ITunes style directory. I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and discover so the open web can flourish. Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for commercial applications). Feedback always welcome! Feed Reader https://pine.blog https://pine.blog Feed Directory https://pine.blog/search https://pine.blog/search
- enz 7y ago
  > RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling Or by using Atom instead of RSS! Atom is very well supported too. Actually, we sometimes say "RSS" to refer to a feed whenever it is RSS or Atom.
  - sonicrocketman 7y ago
    I typically say “feed” since JSON Feed, Atom, and more fit into that category.
overcast 7y ago
What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder, and a few months later they discontinued support.
- favorited 7y ago
  If you're on a Mac, NetNewsWire just released a new version after many years. Plus, it's open source.
  - overcast 7y ago
    I'll check that one, looks like the only one that doesn't require some type of online account. I just want a desktop client.
  - Zelphyr 7y ago
    NetNewsWire is a wonderful piece of software. I remember it being a part of my daily routine back in 2005ish but then it got bought and bought again and I couldn't afford the price of it (thanks Great Recession!) so I stopped using it. It has been graciously returned to the hands of Brent Simmons, its original developer, who has himself graciously made it Open Source and as fantastic as it ever was.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Nearly perfect for me but I can't stand three column layout apps. Give me a nice condensed list view a la apple mail, and an option to hide the article pane and defer to pop ups (or open in line like inoreader).
- detaro 7y ago
  inoreader, Newsblur, The Old Reader, NetNewsWire
  - smichael 7y ago
    bazqux, Feedbin
- MattSayar 7y ago
m-p-3 7y ago
If your main concern is people scrapping your blog or only reading the RSS without visiting it directly, at least put the first paragraph in the feed. I prefer seeing the whole article, but at least having a preview let me decide if I want to keep reading, and it let me knows something new came out.
dwheeler 7y ago
RSS can be used for more than traditional blogs, too. The CII Best Practices badge has a "projects" page that lists all projects working on or achieving a badge: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects . You'll notice an RSS symbol; if you click on it, you'll be led to https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed (in your preferred language) that will show you projects listed in reverse-latest-edit order (so you can see who's made the latest changes to their badge info). Once you start thinking of RSS as a way to tell people "what's new" in a simple common format, there are lots of interesting uses for it.
ddrager 7y ago
Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole. 3. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1. As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days. ^1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss%20feed https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
- technotarek 7y ago
  To address #3, provide only the title and a very brief excerpt in your feed with a link to the full monetized post.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    This solves #2 as well, to the extent that copying your content wholesale becomes almost as hard as it would have been had you not had an RSS feed in the first place.
  - mcgrath_sh 7y ago
    Yup. I wouldn’t subscribe to the Athletic without an RSS feed. I stopped reading Players Tribune when they axed their feed. Give me title, tags, and first two sentences so I can categorize the feeds and I’m a happy camper. I got rid of my reddit app on my phone. I was needlessly checking reddit multiple times a day. RSS provides me the same information without having to argue with people who are “wrong online.”
  - chii 7y ago
    Except now your readers have to click out of the RSS reader, rather than stay in there and read. I find it jarring and obtrusive to do that, and prefer just to visit the site instead if they RSS did this.
non-entity 7y ago
I'm thinking of starting a blog soon, does anyone know if the popular static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, etc.) have trivial support for RSS?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Jekyll has a plug-in (jekyll-feed) for adding an Atom feed, which is what I use for my website: https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    With Jekyll you can also get a simple RSS view directly in a page template, rather than bring in a full plugin. (Useful, for instance, on GitHub Pages where the available plugins are restricted.) For example: https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-pages/feed.xml https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-pa... (Mine's additional fun because I also tried to make sure that three previous RSS URLs remained supported in my migrations across multiple blog engines over more than a decade and a half.)
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      jekyll-feed is whitelisted for use on GitHub Pages: https://pages.github.com/versions/ https://pages.github.com/versions/
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        Good to know. (Looks like Jekyll-feed was added to GitHub Pages sometime in 2016, and I last updated my RSS feed way back in 2015.)
toyg 7y ago
It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest ever success-story in web-publishing, WordPress, reached early popularity because it had first-class support oob for two formats that declined a few years later: XHTML and RSS.
sandov 7y ago
I've never really understood how one is supposed to use RSS. Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web browser? I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I tried.
- jeena 7y ago
  I wrote a frontend https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey for TT-RSS and I only subscribe to feeds with full articles which I can read offline.
- pp19dd 7y ago
  Behaviorally, it's a dead practice. As individuals, we used to look at all content ingested by readers (programs or Google Reader/feedly) and ourselves cherry-pick the articles, posts we wanted to see. Like an old newsgroup reader. Gradually that function has moved into programming beyond your control showing you suggested content filtered via models that show you only what they think you want to see. Buzzword: AI. Roll your eyes. Some sites would provide a teaser, others full content, some would put an advertiser's message in the body and a catchy title. It was up to the content maker. Typically there'd always be some reduction in the actual markup/content itself. Interesting things you really liked you might have clicked into and seen on the original site for a full experience, fed those people's ads and analytics. But the bottom line is it all largely interworked. One of my favorite things was using iGoogle or netvibes because those two flagships took RSS widgets. Using either custom programming or something like Yahoo Pipes you could cobble together something useful. Like make your own google homepage or dashboard containing both your calendar appointments, filtered gmail, and quirky things like server uptimes, alerts, API usage limits widgets, fun webcomics. From a publisher's perspective, RSS is still used to connect disparate publishing systems together since it's a standard. From one content management system you can pipe material to a blog widget, to a mobile app endpoint, to a partner site, to an affiliate. Direct site hosting is down but even now we use RSS to feed media partners like Facebook instant, Google News producer, Google News on [Voice] Assistant, twitter (via publish vendor), Apple podcasts (actually that might be JSON, but maybe wasn't always?), etc.
swlkr 7y ago
I prefer email newsletters to RSS, the content typically looks better, and it makes economic sense.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  It does make more sense to have them tell you they've posted something new rather than querying every 5 minutes. I'd hate to use email for high volume feeds, like HN, but I think it's an ok solution for low volume. However, email isn't anonymous and spam filtering is in the hands of the host which may cause you to miss somethings or even force the publisher to change the address it's sent from because the old one got blacklisted so badly.
revicon 7y ago
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post. After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.
- netsensei 7y ago
  Hypothesis: most users on social media wouldn't publish or share content, let alone leverage RSS, if those platforms didn't exist. Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self hosted users towards those social media. An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped on the Slack bandwagon. I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point, GR did overtake the market of RSS clients. Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of affairs. I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.
throw0101a 7y ago
Are we talking about RSS specifically or a syndication feed generally (i.e., "RSS" proverbially)? Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
- detaro 7y ago
  People use Atom and RSS almost interchangeably. Generally, it doesn't really matter which one of the two you support, nearly everything does both, I'd personally tend towards Atom. IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality, development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    Thirteen years ago, some podcast readers coped with RSS but not Atom, but everything else coped with both just fine. Since then, I think the podcast situation improved so that everything supports Atom; but it’s very difficult to find any information at all about feeds after 2007: the problems were solved, and so no one talks about it. Atom is technically superior to RSS, most concretely in how it specifies the format of fields like title and content, whether they’re plain text or HTML. This means that I can use things like <em> and <code> in my blog post titles and have it work (clients will either display the HTML unaltered, sanitise it, or strip tags, leaving the correct text), and have blog post titles with text like <_>::v::<_> (real example!) not get mangled horrifically. I do not recommend that anything use RSS now.
  - dingus 7y ago
    If anyone is looking for a quick comparison of Atom and RSS formats: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#samples http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.
twsted 7y ago
Apple is doing really good things in Safari for privacy and for the web, but removing support for RSS was surely not one of them.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Not only did they remove it from Safari, they removed RSS support from News as well, probably to push publishers towards using the Apple News format instead :/
cordite 7y ago
For a small competition when I was 14, I worked on a hand rolled CMS system in PHP, MySQL. I remember trying to determine what RSS was and Atom, what it all meant. I thought it was cool and a handy feature I could hook into that little RSS app I found on Kubuntu. Didn't win the competition, but expanded it over a few years and kept using it as my main blog until it fell aside when I went to university. But unfortunately since the death of Google Reader, RSS hasn't found a way back into my life.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
After adding RSS support to my blog, I noticed that it was part of an easy way to implement a backup and restore mechanism.
burtonator 7y ago
RSS is dead... long since dead. There are a myriad of reasons why it died. 1. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so they make money from ads. 2. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS. 3. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one really knows about it. Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform which only has sunset support for RSS http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/
- scarface74 7y ago
  RSS is “dead” as far as users, but who cares? Every site I frequent has an RSS feed - even Reddit. As long as content producers support it, it’s not a problem.
  - bhelkey 7y ago
    As others have mentioned, there is a fear that if RSS users aren't viewing ads and RSS users keep decreasing in number, eventually, content producers will stop supporting it.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Very few sites have the full content in the RSS feed. Some even just have the titles. It doesn’t really effect ad views.
- chmaynard 7y ago
  To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of RSS are greatly exaggerated. :)
- vunie 7y ago
  RSS is very much alive and kicking. It has only lost its status among mainstream users.
jedberg 7y ago
I stopped using RSS when Google Reader went away, but I don't really miss it. I just use HN instead, which is like a curated list of the best stuff and I don't have to already know it exists and be subscribed to an RSS feed. I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.
- asdff 7y ago
  I have a hn rss feed. I have it set where only articles >100 points are pushed to it, otherwise it's a fire hose.
Pete-Codes 7y ago
Ghost has RSS built in.
zenlot 7y ago
I am surprised when people keep saying here that RSS is dead. I am using it more than ever, every site (including hn news) configured by topic in Inoreader. I even have reddit feeds within it via inline reddit. This way I can see my read/unread counts and mark favorites. I can also quickly export my feeds. It works cross device and it's the only source I use for news, articles or anything else I read on web. If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.
- sys_64738 7y ago
  Love Inoreader as it's the closet to Google Reader IMO.
- bhelkey 7y ago
  Just because you have kept using RSS doesn't mean that the community has grown or even that it has stayed constant in size. Interest in RSS (or at least the best proxy I could find, Google searches for "RSS") has been steadily declining since ~2006[1]. > If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again. Assuming RSS continues to decline, I imagine that more and more sites will stop supporting it. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss Disclaimer: Googler if it matters. All opinions are my own.
  - zenlot 7y ago
    Google Trends is not an answer. It's more likely that people will soon be fed up with enormous unrelated content and infinite scrolling, and will revert back to what's actually useful: specialized and managable content. And if you're searching for trends only, you'll be able to find that it's already happening. Community discovered that social networks is not an answer, the content is mostly garbage in there and nobody wants to 'scroll to infinity' anymore. Look at Lisp trends at different time periods in the past 60 or so years. And then at Clojure or functional programming in general now. Re: 'googler' - no it doesn't matter. Just because you're 'googler', doesn't mean that you're right. Lets revise this in 10 years. My bet is: if not RSS, then better RSS ;)
darekkay 7y ago
I'm using RSS feeds daily (even for HN), so it was a no-brainer to add RSS support to my blog as well. I've also created Tip of the Day [1] - while the daily tips can be accessed via an HTML site, I have written it mainly with RSS in mind. [1] https://tips.darekkay.com/ https://tips.darekkay.com/
stijnsanders 7y ago
I've been dabbling on an RSS feed reader of my own for a while now, which sorts all posts by their published date. Do you know how I can get the people over at Hacker Noon to add a <pubDate> element to their RSS feed? I'v tried here: https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/10965 https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/1...
JSavageReal 7y ago
What do people use to read RSS feeds? I stopped following RSS feeds ever since Google Reader shut down, and wondering what a good free replacement is.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Feedly. On iOS it uses the SafariViewController to show the actual web pages in an embedded web view - meaning any content blockers you have installed also work within Feedly.
- Lev1a 7y ago
  Personally I use the "Feedbro Reader" addon for Firefox. Works perfectly fine.
- superkuh 7y ago
  QuiteRSS. It handles my 1MB opml list of RSS feeds fairly easily. Native clients for many OSes.
- jeena 7y ago
  Selfhosted TinyTinyRSS
- xtat 7y ago
  newsblur!
- dingus 7y ago
  https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ NetNewsWire 5 just released for MacOS. I believe it's also coming to iOS eventually.
- Seirdy 7y ago
  The very best RSS reader in my not-so-humble opinion is the FOSS [Newsboat](https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/), the spiritual successor to Newsbeauter. It can pipe article links and text through other programs. I can pipe YouTube videos to youtube-dl, article text through pandoc and w3m, podcast files through podboat (newsboat's sister podcasting program), and links through a bookmarking program. You can also pipe article text through something like urlview to select links by pressing a key. I can also reload each of my 200+ feeds in a different thread to speed things up.
floatboth 7y ago
Please add h-feed to your site: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via https://granary.io/?input=html https://granary.io/?input=html
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  What would be the benefit of this? I always liked microformats, but unlike RSS, they are truly dead. There never were many End-User Applications that utilized them. I hoped for a long time, browser would integrate features like automatic address or event detection, but it never materialized. And since Firefox won't even mention RSS feeds these days, I am not sure what microformats gets us at this point.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    https://indieweb.org/projects https://indieweb.org/projects microformats + webmention == twitter-like replies across websites
SanchoPanda 7y ago
Or make your own super easy peasy RSS feed for almost any site with lynx/w3m/curl/etc and diff.
amelius 7y ago
Can't this be automated by a service which "diffs" websites over time?
rcarmo 7y ago
Funny how RSS managed to take off originally by focusing on discoverability (education about meta tags, the infamous orange “broadcasting” icon, etc.) and these days it’s still plagued by lack of discoverability or misunderstandings as to its use and reach. All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news and other info. When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly seems to be the most popular). I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds, which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”). In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.
meerita 7y ago
I stopped using Facebook and other social networks in favor of reading more blogs and write on mine. I installed a new RSS feed and I enjoy it quite a lot.
paxys 7y ago
I don't get why everyone here is complaining about RSS dying. It still exists. Almost every blog platform and news/content website publishes RSS feeds. There are some great apps for reading feeds on desktop and mobile (including features like offline syncing). There are a bunch of RSS add-ons for Chrome and Firefox. Slack natively supports piping feeds into a channel. You can even build RSS workflows with Zapier or IFTTT. Yes it isn't the hottest thing in the tech world today, but it doesn't have to be.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  Without being in the zeitgeist, it's liable to disappear as time goes by.
- xtat 7y ago
  Agree with you - I think the problem isn't the lack of widely available feeds but the harmful sentiment that RSS is somehow obsolete and unnecessary so many newer well meaning apps don't spend the effort to add it.
kazinator 7y ago
Sites don't offer RSS because - they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was in its heyday and don't know what it is. - sites operators want to human users to interact with their site specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing) in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been commoditized and aggregated. Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself. But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has the condensed info right there.
- xtat 7y ago
  Dear site operators: enjoy obscurity
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
How do you sell an RSS feed addition to a profit-only minded manager? How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout them as they demand?
- torstenvl 7y ago
  You don't sell "RSS" or any other tech speak. You sell a proven syndication technology that effectively pushes notifications to the user that there's more content on your server for them to come look at. And unlike Google News or similar syndication mechanisms, your company gets to choose what and how much content to include in the blurb/hook.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  Hey boss I have this great way to publish content to our users that works without Facebook getting in the way of showing half our stuff. We can provide a snippet of our article and people will never miss when we have something new for them.
3xblah 7y ago
Instead of just reacting to the instantly agreeable title, out of curiousity I read the blog post and checked the blogroll the author cites as the cause for him to comment on adding RSS support. It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn and mikebabb. Neither has much content.
- 3xblah 7y ago
  s/curiousity/curiosity
forrestthewoods 7y ago
> Can you think of a good reason NOT to use RSS on a website? What am I missing here? Because not enough readers use RSS to justify the time.
Shorn 7y ago
I run a SAAS for forwarding email addresses in order to protect email addresses by handing out individualised burner addresses that you can block if people start to abuse them with uninvited mail. For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my service. I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam, github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my inbox. There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own domain to avoid being locked in to my service.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service If it's relevant - and I mean, it actually adds to the discussion, and not just matches the keywords for which you try to adveritse it - then it's fine to mention your service. We're all interested in discovering new stuff here.
xtat 7y ago
If you don't have RSS I won't see what you post unless it gets absurdly popular. I'm not coming to your website. Sorry.
nreece 7y ago
Absolutely agree, RSS feeds help save so much time for end-users, and makes contextual skimming much easier in one place. * Shameless plug *: Our little service, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, helps create RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs, and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.
palashkulsh 7y ago
just like RSS should be there for latest articles, sitemaps should also be there for collection of all articles on the blog. So that we are not at the mercy of crawlers to get list of all articles of a blog.
kkarakk 7y ago
RSS feeds are designed for an offline first usecase. Almost no one subscribes to this usecase anymore since mobile internet is just REALLY good MOST of the time. When it isn't - subway rides, long commutes passing through areas with weak signals - i just listen to podcasts instead of the frustration of reading an article and not being able to search anything instantly.
rsscircus 7y ago
Looking at the blogroll he's talking aboit, I counted : 9 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery + link pointing to the RSS feed 20 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery only 3 blogs with link to the RSS feed 4 blogs with nothing (including it's own blog) RSS link+autodiscovery would be so cool on every blog!
mikorym 7y ago
RSS and IRC I think have that timeless quality that may mean that it will not die out, and hopefully have perennial resurgences. Not just the irritation of FB style notifications and dark patterns, but also speed and uniform customisation play a role. Why let FB guess what I want to see if I know which I need to see to be ha ppy/productive/nonnarcissist?
- asdff 7y ago
  The strength of being a protocol and not a platform.
pjmlp 7y ago
My lousy one never let it go. RSS is a protocol, not something that depends on Web readers, browser extensions, native app, whatever. Each one should use whatever they feel like, and I never understood the drama around Google's reader.
asdff 7y ago
I use RSS for everything I do on the internet: news, other websites, subreddits, craigslist, hn, even journal articles. On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and keep track of colleagues.
bbyford 7y ago
RSS is literally how I get my news from the web. We should be making useage and protocal better for the modern concerns of power consumption (bandwidth usage), delivery and user discovery.
crtasm 7y ago
I was looking for a feed for the broadcaster Arte's website and found https://rssbridge.net/ https://rssbridge.net/ which has 'bridges' for a large number of sites. Can be self-hosted too.
quintonish 7y ago
I made a thing that sends an email when a list on the internet changes https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur
hootbootscoot 7y ago
n-gate has your number pegged, comment thread. the summary is succinct, brutal, and highly comical.

904 points by kevq 7y ago

bhhaskin 7y ago

Yes please. We need to keep the web open and federated.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Fogest 7y ago

Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.

nickthegreek 7y ago
looks like he added a link to his RSS (https://kevq.uk/feed https://kevq.uk/feed) at the end of the article, but like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.
- Fogest 7y ago
  Yeah I saw the link there but unfortunately that is not very helpful as if he isn't doing that on every single article you'll have a hard time finding it.
- Deimorz 7y ago
  It's because he doesn't have one of the rel="alternate" tags that RSS readers look for: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting... (not sure why this MDN page is marked as "obsolete").
  - type0 7y ago
    Maybe because mozilla removed built in rss support from firefox?
    - notriddle 7y ago
      That and Firefox never made it particularly easy to find, and even if you notice it, you might not know how to trigger their auto-detection. In any case, I sent him an email with info on how to add it.
    - kgwxd 7y ago
      That's not a Firefox thing, all RSS readers look for that. It's what allows you to paste the url from, say, a YouTube channel and the reader is able to find the feed for that channel without knowing anything about how YouTube fashions their rss urls.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  Without that manually added link in the one article, there's no way to locate his feed. His blog could have been one of the ones he's complaining about.
itsjloh 7y ago
Exactly! I wonder if this is the reason behind them not being able to find a lot of the RSS feeds originally.

sylk 7y ago

I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote." I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.

dewey 7y ago
Luckily some readers also include a "always fetch full content" feature that pulls the linked page and runs it through a "reader mode" to remove the garbage. These kind of feeds really annoy me.
shakna 7y ago
A bit of that is that RSS simply doesn't have great character support. You have to escape a whole bunch of stuff that is useful to have in the final product - because for most users the RSS is a notification feed, not the endpoint they go to.
rtkwe 7y ago
If the site is ad supported I can see why they're doing it. Can't serve ads in the RSS feed (some RSS readers reserve that right for themselves).
- crtasm 7y ago
  You can use basic HTML and embed images, there's nothing stopping you putting adverts in a feed.
k1m 7y ago
I work on a project that can transform many of those feeds into full-text versions: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ https://fivefilters.org/content-only/ Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
cytzol 7y ago
> I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow set of HTML allowed in the <description> tag, I don't have anything in there and just have a link to my site. There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.

bad_user 7y ago

I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website generator like Jekyll or equivalent. Some of them don't have RSS feeds. But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed. Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but any one will do. Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional. And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the <head> of all your pages, like: <link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml"> [1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed [2] https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml

alexott 7y ago
From my experience (as maintainer of a Planet Clojure), some sites have feeds, but simply don’t expose them via links or meta. I’m usually trying some standard paths before contacting author: /rss/, /feed/, /atom.xml, etc.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
If you want to go the extra mile... For blogs that are open source, as many GitHub Pages are, you could even submit a pull request to add the RSS feed! Or write up a blog post of how to add an RSS feed to Jekyll site and submit a ticket w/ the link to your post.

gjstein 7y ago

Easy enough to support this article; RSS is good for the open web and relatively trivial to support: took me maybe an hour for my personal blog, compared to the enormous effort I've put into CSS and formatting for the website proper. I'd love to get a feeling for how many folks here have a blog with RSS support and what the relative level of traffic is between RSS and other forms of traffic. Does anyone have statistics they'd care to share?

Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago

Totally! It makes content so easy to track. I try to use Twitter a little bit for this, but most accounts post lots of other tweets in addition to "new post", so I have to spend time trying to guess which hashtags they might use to denote actual posts. Separately, I really like JSONFeed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed. It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on more.

kgwxd 7y ago

I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place. I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.

rtkwe 7y ago
I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't generally allow ads and tracking to be added.
- notriddle 7y ago
  Anything that allows you to post arbitrary content can support ads. [This comment was brought to you by https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/, the more exclusive alternative to The Orange Site! Ask for an invite in IRC.]
  - minikites 7y ago
    I think this is what John Gruber does for the Daring Fireball RSS feed.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Does Lobsters have some sort of comment cross-posting feature now?
- kgwxd 7y ago
  I don't think that's it. Almost every major site has RSS, but it's usually just headlines, which I think is fine.
sys_64738 7y ago
I use RSS for everything and anything which isn't an RSS feed gets ignored. Life is too short.

SamWhited 7y ago

Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should feel bad if you're using) finally added RSS feeds, but I still have to try and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.

julien 7y ago
Medium has RSS feeds for pretty much everything, from users to tags to publications, to tags in a publications, to stories clapped on by a given user....
- SamWhited 7y ago
  yes, that's what I said. For the longest time they only had comments though and not the posts themselves (or at least, they didn't advertise it if they already did). Now they have it but they don't have a proper meta tag and they don't link to it anywhere that I can find.
benoliver999 7y ago
For instance, it took me a while to find the feed of the site in the site linked. It's in the post, but if you go to the home page it is tricky to find.
jeena 7y ago
I have the problem that those meta links are kind of useless nowadays because Firefox removed the possibility to use Navigator.registerContentHandler() so I could redirect from the Feed button in the Firefox UI to TT-RSS. Now the button in the UI let's me download the Feed resource which doesn't make sense.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  I believe the rss:// protocol could (still can?) be used to shell out to your reader.

danShumway 7y ago

Curiosity question, will most modern RSS-readers be able to find an RSS link on their own, or is it a good idea for me to include a link on a homepage that users can copy-paste? I've never advertised any of my rss feeds, I just leave them up at <domain>/rss.xml. I was under the impression that RSS feed locations were mostly standardized, but I'm noticing that the feed location for this blog is at a different URL.

dewey 7y ago
Usually they are able to find it, I never had the problem that it couldn't be found if there was a feed URL in the source code. (Using the selfhosted version of Miniflux). It's too bad that browsers removed the RSS icon in the URL bar.
jtbayly 7y ago
You need to advertise it in the head section of your html. Then any reader will find it.
Deimorz 7y ago
They should be able to find it as long as you have a <link> or <a> tag with the correct attributes/values on them. See this section and the one below it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
rsscircus 7y ago
An RSS link on homepage AND a RSS Autodiscovery link in the source code is for me the best solution. RSS Autodiscovery make it discoverable by any RSS reader

AndrewStephens 7y ago

I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging. It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then. In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see it return. Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was RSS[0]. [0] https://sheep.horse/rss.xml https://sheep.horse/rss.xml

smush 7y ago
> In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/ I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the same.
- spiderfarmer 7y ago
  That’s one of the reasons I have Telemetry turned on. Just to show what I am using, so there’s less reasons to remove something.
  - choward 7y ago
    Do you think that's what telemetry is actually used for?
    - apetresc 7y ago
      ...yes?
- orf 7y ago
  Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.

simplecomplex 7y ago

Yeah, and please link to it so my feed reader can pick it up from the URL.

baal80spam 7y ago

I love RSS so much. I use inoreader but there are many free RSS readers available (like feedly). I don't subscribe to anything via any other means - RSS completely covers my daily news needs. Please keep it alive!

drinchev 7y ago

Funny story. Most blogs I follow via my Reeder [0] ( actually best app I've ever used for (i|mac)OS ... no, I'm not affiliated with the app ) are ones that end up on HN. It's funny but my RSS feed currently is 30% HN / 30% Media websites like The Guardian / 40% Other. Since a year or two I rarely add new sources to my feed, which I feel it's sad. 0: https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com

snazz 7y ago

Is it just Jekyll or do most static site generators include an RSS link in their default templates?

OrgNet 7y ago
Hugo does too

jandrese 7y ago

RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want. Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

notriddle 7y ago
RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There is no “walled garden” around Apple’s podcast. They crawl and index RSS feeds just like Google crawls web pages. Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website. You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url. On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use. If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.
  - jeffchien 7y ago
    I think you are currently right, but that's probably ending soon as Apple looks to fund their own exclusive podcasts too [1]. I hope podcasters and their cooperatives/companies can resist the siren call. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fund-exclusive-podcasts-to-challenge-spotify/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fun...
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I would be okay with that if Apple introduced a standard in the RSS feed that allowed subscription, paid for podcasts that worked across apps. I’m all for a business model that lets me give companies money and they give me stuff as opposed to advertising.

latexr 7y ago

> But I was surprised to learn that many of the blogs that Jan had linked to didn't support RSS. I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from the home URL. Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no reference to it. If I didn’t think it odd that the author wasn’t providing a feed, I wouldn’t have found it. Blog platforms tend to provide support for RSS feeds because blog platforms are built by people who care about such things, so even if the writer doesn’t care, the feed will be there. I’m more worried about the lack of RSS support in big popular platforms that have no reason to not provide one, such as the News page on the Epic Games Store[3]. [1]: It may be that some were auto-generated and provided wrong info; I didn’t verify them in depth. [2]: https://www.reederapp.com/ https://www.reederapp.com/ [3]: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news

Deimorz 7y ago
I think he doesn't know how the automatic discovery of RSS feeds works, and just looks for a visual link to one. Like you said, he missed a lot of them, and isn't linking to his own feed properly on his site so that RSS readers can find it (with rel="alternate" and/or type="application/rss+xml").

bovermyer 7y ago

If you use Hugo, here's how to add an RSS link to your site. Just add the following to your <head> area in your template(s): {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "rss" -}} {{ printf `<link rel="%s" type="%s" href="%s" title="%s" />` .Rel .MediaType.Type .Permalink $.Site.Title | safeHTML }} {{ end -}} Related link: https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout

jdofaz 7y ago

Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS. They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not available on Apple News"

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
They were just trying to make it user friendly because they know everyone really wants to go to Apple News instead. /s
freehunter 7y ago
iOS these days has a major problem of allowing webpages to redirect automatically to the app or worse, to the App Store. Every now and again I have to fight Amazon to let me open a link in Safari instead of the Amazon app. Generally it's because I cannot purchase the item inside of the app (digital content like movies and Kindle books), but they still automatically open the app and make me do a dance to get it in Safari. Same thing with Yelp, under no circumstances am I ever able to get a Yelp link to open on their website. YouTube does the same thing, and I've had Gmail do it a few times too. It's one thing to show a banner at the top letting me know you have an app. But I never want to be directed from Safari into an app. If I wanted to use the app, I'd have opened the app. Since I'm in Safari, it means I want to use the web site.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Why have the apps installed at all? There is nothing I can do in the apps that I can’t do on the websites. Usually the apps are worse.
  - mcgrath_sh 7y ago
    Watching ESPN in the browser is a worse experience than ESPN’s app. I have the app on my phone for this. There are reasons to have apps on a phone. That said, it is infuriating that when I click an ESPN link on twitter, it opens in the ESPN app and not a web browser.

robmoorman 7y ago

Yes fully agree, rss is (still) a very nice way in providing structured content.

tschellenbach 7y ago

If you want to contribute to help create a consumer-grade RSS reading experience: https://github.com/getstream/winds https://github.com/getstream/winds I think part of the problem is that there are no RSS readers that try to appeal to a mainstream user audience. They are all tailored to power users.

velcrovan 7y ago

Just the other day I wrote an RSS (well, Atom) feed generator for my site in Racket: https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f

djhworld 7y ago

I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice (newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before heading home. Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article. I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow. A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS feed for my client to subscribe to. I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal implications of it

MapleWalnut 7y ago
That's a great idea. I would definitely use a service like that.
- djhworld 7y ago
  I think other people in this thread are running services that do a similar thing. My crisis of conscience was around storing the full text of the articles on my own server and then presenting them as a new feed on my domain, e.g. https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml Everything in the feed is that gets generated is exactly the same as the original feed (canonical link to the actual article, publsh date, author etc) the only difference was the text in the body of each entry.
  - WiseWeasel 7y ago
    It's likely that unless you can claim status as a library or some other exception to copyright protections, as a commercial entity providing that service without compensating publishers, such a straightforward violation would get a bunch of takedown requests and eventual lawsuits for failure to respond to those requests, along with more suits if publishers have no easy way of opting out. As a personal tool you built for yourself and your friend(s) nerdy enough to understand it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as no search engines index your site and no one finds out about it.

sonicrocketman 7y ago

Widespread RSS support is crucial to pushing the open web forward and allowing the ecosystem to compete with mainstream social networks. RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling. Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t have is an ITunes style directory. I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and discover so the open web can flourish. Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for commercial applications). Feedback always welcome! Feed Reader https://pine.blog https://pine.blog Feed Directory https://pine.blog/search https://pine.blog/search

enz 7y ago
> RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling Or by using Atom instead of RSS! Atom is very well supported too. Actually, we sometimes say "RSS" to refer to a feed whenever it is RSS or Atom.
- sonicrocketman 7y ago
  I typically say “feed” since JSON Feed, Atom, and more fit into that category.

overcast 7y ago

What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder, and a few months later they discontinued support.

favorited 7y ago
If you're on a Mac, NetNewsWire just released a new version after many years. Plus, it's open source.
- overcast 7y ago
  I'll check that one, looks like the only one that doesn't require some type of online account. I just want a desktop client.
- Zelphyr 7y ago
  NetNewsWire is a wonderful piece of software. I remember it being a part of my daily routine back in 2005ish but then it got bought and bought again and I couldn't afford the price of it (thanks Great Recession!) so I stopped using it. It has been graciously returned to the hands of Brent Simmons, its original developer, who has himself graciously made it Open Source and as fantastic as it ever was.
- asdff 7y ago
  Nearly perfect for me but I can't stand three column layout apps. Give me a nice condensed list view a la apple mail, and an option to hide the article pane and defer to pop ups (or open in line like inoreader).
detaro 7y ago
inoreader, Newsblur, The Old Reader, NetNewsWire
- smichael 7y ago
  bazqux, Feedbin
MattSayar 7y ago

m-p-3 7y ago

If your main concern is people scrapping your blog or only reading the RSS without visiting it directly, at least put the first paragraph in the feed. I prefer seeing the whole article, but at least having a preview let me decide if I want to keep reading, and it let me knows something new came out.

dwheeler 7y ago

RSS can be used for more than traditional blogs, too. The CII Best Practices badge has a "projects" page that lists all projects working on or achieving a badge: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects . You'll notice an RSS symbol; if you click on it, you'll be led to https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed (in your preferred language) that will show you projects listed in reverse-latest-edit order (so you can see who's made the latest changes to their badge info). Once you start thinking of RSS as a way to tell people "what's new" in a simple common format, there are lots of interesting uses for it.

ddrager 7y ago

Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog: 1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1. 2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole. 3. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1. As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days. ^1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss%20feed https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

technotarek 7y ago
To address #3, provide only the title and a very brief excerpt in your feed with a link to the full monetized post.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  This solves #2 as well, to the extent that copying your content wholesale becomes almost as hard as it would have been had you not had an RSS feed in the first place.
- mcgrath_sh 7y ago
  Yup. I wouldn’t subscribe to the Athletic without an RSS feed. I stopped reading Players Tribune when they axed their feed. Give me title, tags, and first two sentences so I can categorize the feeds and I’m a happy camper. I got rid of my reddit app on my phone. I was needlessly checking reddit multiple times a day. RSS provides me the same information without having to argue with people who are “wrong online.”
- chii 7y ago
  Except now your readers have to click out of the RSS reader, rather than stay in there and read. I find it jarring and obtrusive to do that, and prefer just to visit the site instead if they RSS did this.

non-entity 7y ago

I'm thinking of starting a blog soon, does anyone know if the popular static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, etc.) have trivial support for RSS?

saagarjha 7y ago
Jekyll has a plug-in (jekyll-feed) for adding an Atom feed, which is what I use for my website: https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  With Jekyll you can also get a simple RSS view directly in a page template, rather than bring in a full plugin. (Useful, for instance, on GitHub Pages where the available plugins are restricted.) For example: https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-pages/feed.xml https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-pa... (Mine's additional fun because I also tried to make sure that three previous RSS URLs remained supported in my migrations across multiple blog engines over more than a decade and a half.)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    jekyll-feed is whitelisted for use on GitHub Pages: https://pages.github.com/versions/ https://pages.github.com/versions/
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Good to know. (Looks like Jekyll-feed was added to GitHub Pages sometime in 2016, and I last updated my RSS feed way back in 2015.)

toyg 7y ago

It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest ever success-story in web-publishing, WordPress, reached early popularity because it had first-class support oob for two formats that declined a few years later: XHTML and RSS.

sandov 7y ago

I've never really understood how one is supposed to use RSS. Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web browser? I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I tried.

jeena 7y ago
I wrote a frontend https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey for TT-RSS and I only subscribe to feeds with full articles which I can read offline.
pp19dd 7y ago
Behaviorally, it's a dead practice. As individuals, we used to look at all content ingested by readers (programs or Google Reader/feedly) and ourselves cherry-pick the articles, posts we wanted to see. Like an old newsgroup reader. Gradually that function has moved into programming beyond your control showing you suggested content filtered via models that show you only what they think you want to see. Buzzword: AI. Roll your eyes. Some sites would provide a teaser, others full content, some would put an advertiser's message in the body and a catchy title. It was up to the content maker. Typically there'd always be some reduction in the actual markup/content itself. Interesting things you really liked you might have clicked into and seen on the original site for a full experience, fed those people's ads and analytics. But the bottom line is it all largely interworked. One of my favorite things was using iGoogle or netvibes because those two flagships took RSS widgets. Using either custom programming or something like Yahoo Pipes you could cobble together something useful. Like make your own google homepage or dashboard containing both your calendar appointments, filtered gmail, and quirky things like server uptimes, alerts, API usage limits widgets, fun webcomics. From a publisher's perspective, RSS is still used to connect disparate publishing systems together since it's a standard. From one content management system you can pipe material to a blog widget, to a mobile app endpoint, to a partner site, to an affiliate. Direct site hosting is down but even now we use RSS to feed media partners like Facebook instant, Google News producer, Google News on [Voice] Assistant, twitter (via publish vendor), Apple podcasts (actually that might be JSON, but maybe wasn't always?), etc.

swlkr 7y ago

I prefer email newsletters to RSS, the content typically looks better, and it makes economic sense.

kgwxd 7y ago
It does make more sense to have them tell you they've posted something new rather than querying every 5 minutes. I'd hate to use email for high volume feeds, like HN, but I think it's an ok solution for low volume. However, email isn't anonymous and spam filtering is in the hands of the host which may cause you to miss somethings or even force the publisher to change the address it's sent from because the old one got blacklisted so badly.

revicon 7y ago

Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post. After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.

netsensei 7y ago
Hypothesis: most users on social media wouldn't publish or share content, let alone leverage RSS, if those platforms didn't exist. Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self hosted users towards those social media. An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped on the Slack bandwagon. I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point, GR did overtake the market of RSS clients. Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of affairs. I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.

throw0101a 7y ago

Are we talking about RSS specifically or a syndication feed generally (i.e., "RSS" proverbially)? Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

detaro 7y ago
People use Atom and RSS almost interchangeably. Generally, it doesn't really matter which one of the two you support, nearly everything does both, I'd personally tend towards Atom. IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality, development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  Thirteen years ago, some podcast readers coped with RSS but not Atom, but everything else coped with both just fine. Since then, I think the podcast situation improved so that everything supports Atom; but it’s very difficult to find any information at all about feeds after 2007: the problems were solved, and so no one talks about it. Atom is technically superior to RSS, most concretely in how it specifies the format of fields like title and content, whether they’re plain text or HTML. This means that I can use things like <em> and <code> in my blog post titles and have it work (clients will either display the HTML unaltered, sanitise it, or strip tags, leaving the correct text), and have blog post titles with text like <_>::v::<_> (real example!) not get mangled horrifically. I do not recommend that anything use RSS now.
- dingus 7y ago
  If anyone is looking for a quick comparison of Atom and RSS formats: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#samples http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.

twsted 7y ago

Apple is doing really good things in Safari for privacy and for the web, but removing support for RSS was surely not one of them.

saagarjha 7y ago
Not only did they remove it from Safari, they removed RSS support from News as well, probably to push publishers towards using the Apple News format instead :/

cordite 7y ago

For a small competition when I was 14, I worked on a hand rolled CMS system in PHP, MySQL. I remember trying to determine what RSS was and Atom, what it all meant. I thought it was cool and a handy feature I could hook into that little RSS app I found on Kubuntu. Didn't win the competition, but expanded it over a few years and kept using it as my main blog until it fell aside when I went to university. But unfortunately since the death of Google Reader, RSS hasn't found a way back into my life.

theandrewbailey 7y ago

After adding RSS support to my blog, I noticed that it was part of an easy way to implement a backup and restore mechanism.

burtonator 7y ago

RSS is dead... long since dead. There are a myriad of reasons why it died. 1. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so they make money from ads. 2. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS. 3. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one really knows about it. Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform which only has sunset support for RSS http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/

scarface74 7y ago
RSS is “dead” as far as users, but who cares? Every site I frequent has an RSS feed - even Reddit. As long as content producers support it, it’s not a problem.
- bhelkey 7y ago
  As others have mentioned, there is a fear that if RSS users aren't viewing ads and RSS users keep decreasing in number, eventually, content producers will stop supporting it.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Very few sites have the full content in the RSS feed. Some even just have the titles. It doesn’t really effect ad views.
chmaynard 7y ago
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of RSS are greatly exaggerated. :)
vunie 7y ago
RSS is very much alive and kicking. It has only lost its status among mainstream users.

jedberg 7y ago

I stopped using RSS when Google Reader went away, but I don't really miss it. I just use HN instead, which is like a curated list of the best stuff and I don't have to already know it exists and be subscribed to an RSS feed. I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.

asdff 7y ago
I have a hn rss feed. I have it set where only articles >100 points are pushed to it, otherwise it's a fire hose.

Pete-Codes 7y ago

Ghost has RSS built in.

zenlot 7y ago

I am surprised when people keep saying here that RSS is dead. I am using it more than ever, every site (including hn news) configured by topic in Inoreader. I even have reddit feeds within it via inline reddit. This way I can see my read/unread counts and mark favorites. I can also quickly export my feeds. It works cross device and it's the only source I use for news, articles or anything else I read on web. If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.

sys_64738 7y ago
Love Inoreader as it's the closet to Google Reader IMO.
bhelkey 7y ago
Just because you have kept using RSS doesn't mean that the community has grown or even that it has stayed constant in size. Interest in RSS (or at least the best proxy I could find, Google searches for "RSS") has been steadily declining since ~2006[1]. > If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again. Assuming RSS continues to decline, I imagine that more and more sites will stop supporting it. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss Disclaimer: Googler if it matters. All opinions are my own.
- zenlot 7y ago
  Google Trends is not an answer. It's more likely that people will soon be fed up with enormous unrelated content and infinite scrolling, and will revert back to what's actually useful: specialized and managable content. And if you're searching for trends only, you'll be able to find that it's already happening. Community discovered that social networks is not an answer, the content is mostly garbage in there and nobody wants to 'scroll to infinity' anymore. Look at Lisp trends at different time periods in the past 60 or so years. And then at Clojure or functional programming in general now. Re: 'googler' - no it doesn't matter. Just because you're 'googler', doesn't mean that you're right. Lets revise this in 10 years. My bet is: if not RSS, then better RSS ;)

darekkay 7y ago

I'm using RSS feeds daily (even for HN), so it was a no-brainer to add RSS support to my blog as well. I've also created Tip of the Day [1] - while the daily tips can be accessed via an HTML site, I have written it mainly with RSS in mind. [1] https://tips.darekkay.com/ https://tips.darekkay.com/

stijnsanders 7y ago

I've been dabbling on an RSS feed reader of my own for a while now, which sorts all posts by their published date. Do you know how I can get the people over at Hacker Noon to add a <pubDate> element to their RSS feed? I'v tried here: https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/10965 https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/1...

JSavageReal 7y ago

What do people use to read RSS feeds? I stopped following RSS feeds ever since Google Reader shut down, and wondering what a good free replacement is.

scarface74 7y ago
Feedly. On iOS it uses the SafariViewController to show the actual web pages in an embedded web view - meaning any content blockers you have installed also work within Feedly.
Lev1a 7y ago
Personally I use the "Feedbro Reader" addon for Firefox. Works perfectly fine.
superkuh 7y ago
QuiteRSS. It handles my 1MB opml list of RSS feeds fairly easily. Native clients for many OSes.
jeena 7y ago
Selfhosted TinyTinyRSS
xtat 7y ago
newsblur!
dingus 7y ago
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ NetNewsWire 5 just released for MacOS. I believe it's also coming to iOS eventually.
Seirdy 7y ago
The very best RSS reader in my not-so-humble opinion is the FOSS [Newsboat](https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/), the spiritual successor to Newsbeauter. It can pipe article links and text through other programs. I can pipe YouTube videos to youtube-dl, article text through pandoc and w3m, podcast files through podboat (newsboat's sister podcasting program), and links through a bookmarking program. You can also pipe article text through something like urlview to select links by pressing a key. I can also reload each of my 200+ feeds in a different thread to speed things up.

floatboth 7y ago

Please add h-feed to your site: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via https://granary.io/?input=html https://granary.io/?input=html

Grumbledour 7y ago
What would be the benefit of this? I always liked microformats, but unlike RSS, they are truly dead. There never were many End-User Applications that utilized them. I hoped for a long time, browser would integrate features like automatic address or event detection, but it never materialized. And since Firefox won't even mention RSS feeds these days, I am not sure what microformats gets us at this point.
- floatboth 7y ago
  https://indieweb.org/projects https://indieweb.org/projects microformats + webmention == twitter-like replies across websites

SanchoPanda 7y ago

Or make your own super easy peasy RSS feed for almost any site with lynx/w3m/curl/etc and diff.

amelius 7y ago

Can't this be automated by a service which "diffs" websites over time?

rcarmo 7y ago

Funny how RSS managed to take off originally by focusing on discoverability (education about meta tags, the infamous orange “broadcasting” icon, etc.) and these days it’s still plagued by lack of discoverability or misunderstandings as to its use and reach. All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news and other info. When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly seems to be the most popular). I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds, which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”). In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.

meerita 7y ago

I stopped using Facebook and other social networks in favor of reading more blogs and write on mine. I installed a new RSS feed and I enjoy it quite a lot.

paxys 7y ago

I don't get why everyone here is complaining about RSS dying. It still exists. Almost every blog platform and news/content website publishes RSS feeds. There are some great apps for reading feeds on desktop and mobile (including features like offline syncing). There are a bunch of RSS add-ons for Chrome and Firefox. Slack natively supports piping feeds into a channel. You can even build RSS workflows with Zapier or IFTTT. Yes it isn't the hottest thing in the tech world today, but it doesn't have to be.

JetSpiegel 7y ago
Without being in the zeitgeist, it's liable to disappear as time goes by.
xtat 7y ago
Agree with you - I think the problem isn't the lack of widely available feeds but the harmful sentiment that RSS is somehow obsolete and unnecessary so many newer well meaning apps don't spend the effort to add it.

kazinator 7y ago

Sites don't offer RSS because - they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was in its heyday and don't know what it is. - sites operators want to human users to interact with their site specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing) in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been commoditized and aggregated. Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself. But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has the condensed info right there.

xtat 7y ago
Dear site operators: enjoy obscurity

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

How do you sell an RSS feed addition to a profit-only minded manager? How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout them as they demand?

torstenvl 7y ago
You don't sell "RSS" or any other tech speak. You sell a proven syndication technology that effectively pushes notifications to the user that there's more content on your server for them to come look at. And unlike Google News or similar syndication mechanisms, your company gets to choose what and how much content to include in the blurb/hook.
tomjen3 7y ago
Hey boss I have this great way to publish content to our users that works without Facebook getting in the way of showing half our stuff. We can provide a snippet of our article and people will never miss when we have something new for them.

3xblah 7y ago

Instead of just reacting to the instantly agreeable title, out of curiousity I read the blog post and checked the blogroll the author cites as the cause for him to comment on adding RSS support. It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn and mikebabb. Neither has much content.

3xblah 7y ago
s/curiousity/curiosity

forrestthewoods 7y ago

> Can you think of a good reason NOT to use RSS on a website? What am I missing here? Because not enough readers use RSS to justify the time.

Shorn 7y ago

I run a SAAS for forwarding email addresses in order to protect email addresses by handing out individualised burner addresses that you can block if people start to abuse them with uninvited mail. For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my service. I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam, github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my inbox. There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own domain to avoid being locked in to my service.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service If it's relevant - and I mean, it actually adds to the discussion, and not just matches the keywords for which you try to adveritse it - then it's fine to mention your service. We're all interested in discovering new stuff here.

xtat 7y ago

If you don't have RSS I won't see what you post unless it gets absurdly popular. I'm not coming to your website. Sorry.

nreece 7y ago

Absolutely agree, RSS feeds help save so much time for end-users, and makes contextual skimming much easier in one place. * Shameless plug *: Our little service, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, helps create RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs, and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.

palashkulsh 7y ago

just like RSS should be there for latest articles, sitemaps should also be there for collection of all articles on the blog. So that we are not at the mercy of crawlers to get list of all articles of a blog.

kkarakk 7y ago

RSS feeds are designed for an offline first usecase. Almost no one subscribes to this usecase anymore since mobile internet is just REALLY good MOST of the time. When it isn't - subway rides, long commutes passing through areas with weak signals - i just listen to podcasts instead of the frustration of reading an article and not being able to search anything instantly.

rsscircus 7y ago

Looking at the blogroll he's talking aboit, I counted : 9 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery + link pointing to the RSS feed 20 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery only 3 blogs with link to the RSS feed 4 blogs with nothing (including it's own blog) RSS link+autodiscovery would be so cool on every blog!

mikorym 7y ago

RSS and IRC I think have that timeless quality that may mean that it will not die out, and hopefully have perennial resurgences. Not just the irritation of FB style notifications and dark patterns, but also speed and uniform customisation play a role. Why let FB guess what I want to see if I know which I need to see to be ha ppy/productive/nonnarcissist?

asdff 7y ago
The strength of being a protocol and not a platform.

pjmlp 7y ago

My lousy one never let it go. RSS is a protocol, not something that depends on Web readers, browser extensions, native app, whatever. Each one should use whatever they feel like, and I never understood the drama around Google's reader.

asdff 7y ago

I use RSS for everything I do on the internet: news, other websites, subreddits, craigslist, hn, even journal articles. On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and keep track of colleagues.

bbyford 7y ago

RSS is literally how I get my news from the web. We should be making useage and protocal better for the modern concerns of power consumption (bandwidth usage), delivery and user discovery.

crtasm 7y ago

I was looking for a feed for the broadcaster Arte's website and found https://rssbridge.net/ https://rssbridge.net/ which has 'bridges' for a large number of sites. Can be self-hosted too.

quintonish 7y ago

I made a thing that sends an email when a list on the internet changes https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur

hootbootscoot 7y ago

n-gate has your number pegged, comment thread. the summary is succinct, brutal, and highly comical.