5 ms·

1) This makes perfect business sense: Google failed to create its own social feed that would stick, so instead it's piggybacking off of a standard technology (a

1) This makes perfect business sense: Google failed to create its own social feed that would stick, so instead it's piggybacking off of a standard technology (and I'm sure it'll collect plenty of data just like it would from an actual social feed). This is what Google did in the early days with other technologies like the open web and email, and it's generally a good thing for everybody (until they enter the "extend" and "extinguish" phases later on) 2) Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? I've already added RSS to my site, but right now there's just a home page link to the XML document, I'm not sure how it would be auto-discovered for such a "follow" button

scrollaway 5y ago
> Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? Yes. Add a link like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My articles" href="/articles/rss/" /> (Or more likely, application/atom+xml -- rss is not great, atom is generally what you want, and what you'll be publishing)
- brundolf 5y ago
  Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
  - clscott 5y ago
    Honestly adding both isn't necessary. Just use Atom because RSS is an ill defined hodgepodge. I work for a service that creates "RSS" feeds as a side effect of what we do and they've all be Atom for 10+ years with no issues. Please let the RSS format die.
    - brundolf 5y ago
      I have no horse in this race (I don't even know what Atom is tbh; I'm inferring that it's some kind of refined subset and/or extension of the RSS spec), and I'd prefer my site to be accessible to as many readers as possible.
      - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
        Atom is basically RSS' successor, fixing some ambiguities in RSS' (lack of) spec.
        adtac 5y ago
        RSS 2 would've been far less confusing
        eli 5y ago
        Unfortunately not. “RSS 2.0” is the current version of old rss
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Okay, fine; call it RSS 3.0
        Woodi 5y ago
        But do you ever saw newer version that is simpler ? :) With less features or not-backward-compatible or without mechanism for plugging developed in future extensions... Making complicate protocol simpler require process equivalent to rewrite in software. Re-architecture the basics. It is more then seldom to the point you can think all that complications are intentional. One example of simplification that happen in IT is UTF-8. But it was more a replacement and big companies didn't switch anyway...
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      RSS is like FTP. In theory it's a simple protocol, but there are so many differing implementations that it's a full-time job to keep up with all the little warts.
- arcbyte 5y ago
  RSS is not great but I abhorred atom with a passion back when I was working with feeds. It was a way overcomplicated xml mess. RSS is so much simpler to work with, you just have to deal with less than stellar documentation.
  - acdha 5y ago
    My impression was the opposite: RSS had so many warts and inconsistencies that you needed complex heuristics & a big test suite to handle things like encodings, relative links, and extensions whereas a single XML parse was all I needed for Atom. The authors had clearly learned the lessons from the early feed producer/consumer projects and tried to avoid making similar problems.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      Your impression is correct.
rakoo 5y ago
There is no standard URL but there is a standard link from the website to the feed: the <link> element in the header. See https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
throwaway3699 5y ago
Generally, you can add a <link> tag in the header, but in practice many websites forgo this or mess up the implementation, so most feed readers have custom search algorithms to try and find them. Just looked through the Chromium source code, the algorithm for finding RSS feeds is here: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:components/feed/core/v2/web_feed_subscriptions/web_feed_index.cc;drc=5c0ae0e0be971540b37bec305e03ae4860703c37;l=434 https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com... [0] https://pypi.org/project/feedsearch/ https://pypi.org/project/feedsearch/ [1] https://fetchrss.com/api https://fetchrss.com/api

scrollaway 5y ago

> Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? Yes. Add a link like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My articles" href="/articles/rss/" /> (Or more likely, application/atom+xml -- rss is not great, atom is generally what you want, and what you'll be publishing)

brundolf 5y ago
Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
- clscott 5y ago
  Honestly adding both isn't necessary. Just use Atom because RSS is an ill defined hodgepodge. I work for a service that creates "RSS" feeds as a side effect of what we do and they've all be Atom for 10+ years with no issues. Please let the RSS format die.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    I have no horse in this race (I don't even know what Atom is tbh; I'm inferring that it's some kind of refined subset and/or extension of the RSS spec), and I'd prefer my site to be accessible to as many readers as possible.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Atom is basically RSS' successor, fixing some ambiguities in RSS' (lack of) spec.
      - adtac 5y ago
        RSS 2 would've been far less confusing
        eli 5y ago
        Unfortunately not. “RSS 2.0” is the current version of old rss
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Okay, fine; call it RSS 3.0
        Woodi 5y ago
        But do you ever saw newer version that is simpler ? :) With less features or not-backward-compatible or without mechanism for plugging developed in future extensions... Making complicate protocol simpler require process equivalent to rewrite in software. Re-architecture the basics. It is more then seldom to the point you can think all that complications are intentional. One example of simplification that happen in IT is UTF-8. But it was more a replacement and big companies didn't switch anyway...
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    RSS is like FTP. In theory it's a simple protocol, but there are so many differing implementations that it's a full-time job to keep up with all the little warts.
arcbyte 5y ago
RSS is not great but I abhorred atom with a passion back when I was working with feeds. It was a way overcomplicated xml mess. RSS is so much simpler to work with, you just have to deal with less than stellar documentation.
- acdha 5y ago
  My impression was the opposite: RSS had so many warts and inconsistencies that you needed complex heuristics & a big test suite to handle things like encodings, relative links, and extensions whereas a single XML parse was all I needed for Atom. The authors had clearly learned the lessons from the early feed producer/consumer projects and tried to avoid making similar problems.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Your impression is correct.

rakoo 5y ago

There is no standard URL but there is a standard link from the website to the feed: the <link> element in the header. See https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

throwaway3699 5y ago

Generally, you can add a <link> tag in the header, but in practice many websites forgo this or mess up the implementation, so most feed readers have custom search algorithms to try and find them. Just looked through the Chromium source code, the algorithm for finding RSS feeds is here: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:components/feed/core/v2/web_feed_subscriptions/web_feed_index.cc;drc=5c0ae0e0be971540b37bec305e03ae4860703c37;l=434 https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com... [0] https://pypi.org/project/feedsearch/ https://pypi.org/project/feedsearch/ [1] https://fetchrss.com/api https://fetchrss.com/api