4 ms·

RSS as a concept is wonderful. In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and incl

by junon 5y ago

RSS as a concept is wonderful. In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use. An RSS reader that lets me keep things in my task bar as a small popup, and shows notifications, is all I want.

fxj 5y ago
I use inoreader.com for reading my rss feeds but also for finding new ones. They have a large RSS directory of all the subscribed feeds of their users at their site which you can search by keywords and create your own RSS feed or just subscribe to them.
pizza234 5y ago
> In practice, getting fulltext is rare It depends on the use case. One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website. Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive consumption :)
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  Sure, but it'd be ideal if clicking on it would load the fulltext rather than jump to my browser and load the source in its full, bloated glory, or at the very least with formatting I can't control.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not Rather like the HN front page. A similarity underscored by Firefox uses (or at least used last I looked) for RSS feeds.
axby 5y ago
I would agree until I found: * newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ * Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article content in most cases): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when I've been following the news obsessively.
mrzool 5y ago
> In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use. You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of choice. If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option which is only 15$/year. Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux was my turning point. [1]: https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  I setup miniflux when feedly accidentally locked me out about a month ago with their login/google apps changes. I have been in love ever since. It’s an amazing rss reader and doesn’t even need an app
calpaterson 5y ago
It is often cost prohibitive to put the full text in the feed because of all the clients that neither handle the inbuilt TTL value, nor use http caching correctly. Large (in terms of bytes) RSS feeds are one of the key places where etags and conditional requests are useful but many clients just ignore all that and repeatedly request the whole feed. This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of bandwidth for a site.
jhot 5y ago
Miniflux enters the chat.
derekzhouzhen 5y ago
Notifications? I don't wand another distraction. I want to read the news when I want to, because 99.9% of the things in the world don't need my immediate attention. A half day delay is fine.
deergomoo 5y ago
> clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use There’s definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more, and there’s NetNewsWire which feels like it’s been around for a million years at this point. > In practice, getting fulltext is rare This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser’s Reader Mode), but it’s not perfect and often totally mangles things like image galleries. It’s a shame, because I find a lot of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there’s an embedded video or “articles you may be interested in”. It destroys my ability to take the article in.
tangue 5y ago
It's disheartening to see your content put in some kind of content farm by a bot. While I miss RSS, I'll never put a feed online again because of SEO dumbasses.
chriswarbo 5y ago
It's certainly frustrating, but the nice thing about RSS is that it's somewhat machine-readable, so we can fix some it automatically. The script I use to fetch RSS will optionally perform two extra steps: fetching the full-text (finding the link using a given XPath expression), then de-cluttering that HTML (removing banners, menu bars, etc.). The result is another RSS feed, which can be published somewhere, subscribed-to in a reader, etc. (I actually transform them to Maildir, since my preferred reader is mu4e)

by junon 5y ago

fxj 5y ago

I use inoreader.com for reading my rss feeds but also for finding new ones. They have a large RSS directory of all the subscribed feeds of their users at their site which you can search by keywords and create your own RSS feed or just subscribe to them.

pizza234 5y ago

> In practice, getting fulltext is rare It depends on the use case. One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website. Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive consumption :)

approxim8ion 5y ago
Sure, but it'd be ideal if clicking on it would load the fulltext rather than jump to my browser and load the source in its full, bloated glory, or at the very least with formatting I can't control.
CRConrad 5y ago
> One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not Rather like the HN front page. A similarity underscored by Firefox uses (or at least used last I looked) for RSS feeds.

axby 5y ago

I would agree until I found: * newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ * Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article content in most cases): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when I've been following the news obsessively.

mrzool 5y ago

> In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use. You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of choice. If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option which is only 15$/year. Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux was my turning point. [1]: https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app

croutonwagon 5y ago
I setup miniflux when feedly accidentally locked me out about a month ago with their login/google apps changes. I have been in love ever since. It’s an amazing rss reader and doesn’t even need an app

calpaterson 5y ago

It is often cost prohibitive to put the full text in the feed because of all the clients that neither handle the inbuilt TTL value, nor use http caching correctly. Large (in terms of bytes) RSS feeds are one of the key places where etags and conditional requests are useful but many clients just ignore all that and repeatedly request the whole feed. This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of bandwidth for a site.

jhot 5y ago

Miniflux enters the chat.

derekzhouzhen 5y ago

Notifications? I don't wand another distraction. I want to read the news when I want to, because 99.9% of the things in the world don't need my immediate attention. A half day delay is fine.

deergomoo 5y ago

> clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use There’s definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more, and there’s NetNewsWire which feels like it’s been around for a million years at this point. > In practice, getting fulltext is rare This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser’s Reader Mode), but it’s not perfect and often totally mangles things like image galleries. It’s a shame, because I find a lot of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there’s an embedded video or “articles you may be interested in”. It destroys my ability to take the article in.

tangue 5y ago

It's disheartening to see your content put in some kind of content farm by a bot. While I miss RSS, I'll never put a feed online again because of SEO dumbasses.

chriswarbo 5y ago

It's certainly frustrating, but the nice thing about RSS is that it's somewhat machine-readable, so we can fix some it automatically. The script I use to fetch RSS will optionally perform two extra steps: fetching the full-text (finding the link using a given XPath expression), then de-cluttering that HTML (removing banners, menu bars, etc.). The result is another RSS feed, which can be published somewhere, subscribed-to in a reader, etc. (I actually transform them to Maildir, since my preferred reader is mu4e)