9 ms·

An example of why RSS is useful and important

259 points by ChrisHardie 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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hutattedonmyarm 5y ago
I have a similar problem: I'd love to have all of my Patreon posts in my RSS reader instead of their shitty app or website. That's sadly not possible. So I'm automatically redirecting all of my Patreon emails to my RSS hosted - which does provide an "email to RSS" feature. It's not perfect, but it works fairly well
kevincox 5y ago
I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down". Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you know you want the feed, so spam is almost a non-issue. However I have seen it the other way where my feed reader is blocked because they have "bot protection" on the RSS feed. This can be called a misconfiguration, but it is a common misconfiguration, and there will always be some level of protection on a feed because in the case of DoS you want to try to filter out the attackers. I guess for something this urgent you can configure your reader to alert you on failures to check but that is not even supported by a lot of readers. The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere. The main advantage of email is that it is natively push, so the updates will almost always be faster (greylisting aside...). This can be resolved with WebSub but support for that is very rare. At the end of the day they are both open protocols and you can handle them however you want, although the infrastructure for RSS is probably more inline with this use case. But then again, I read my RSS feeds via email anyways, so I'm probably biased. My proposal? Support both. RSS is trivial to add support for, and if you have an RSS feed you can add a "subscribe by email" form in a couple clicks using existing services. And overall these public alerts are a seriously unsolved problem. When I lived in Dublin, IE there was a water advisory like this and their only notification mechanism was TV+radio. As with most people under the age of 30 I don't frequently listen to TV or radio so could have been drinking contaminated water for days. I was shocked that they didn't send out a cell-based emergency alert for everyone in the area. But even that wouldn't have caught everything. It would be amazing if my city, province and country all had emergency alerts that I could subscribe to via RSS and email.
- karencarits 5y ago
  I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to keep an archive of important stuff
  - gowld 5y ago
    Richard Stallman browses the web via email. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation). > perfect to keep an archive of important stuff Most stuff is not important.
  - bandie91 5y ago
    at least Delta Chat[1] builds Instant Messaging on the email infrastructure. [1] https://delta.chat https://delta.chat
- spicybright 5y ago
  Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS is worth it for emergency alerts. I'm willing to bet good money <0.5% of the population even use or are aware of RSS. Supporting it also has a very non-trivial cost. Even if it takes a few hours for an engineer to implement it, it'll need to be added to their testing plan to make sure it's reliable. Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails. So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line, so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same way existing emergency systems are.
Daunk 5y ago
I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get based on tags. One tag might give an actual toast notification, one might just be highlighted, others might be dimmed and marked as "uninteresting" and some might be straight up hidden. So far I've not found a single RSS reader I like and they all just sort of act like a basic email client, and usually don't do cross-platform either.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.
- stevekemp 5y ago
  I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for reading feeds. I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon regular expressions, and similar things. It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or article. Those are a bit harder to handle.
  - Naac 5y ago
    There is also the much more complete rss2email tool ( originally started by Aaron Swartz ) https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
- LanternLight83 5y ago
  I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple & Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of custom styles and support for per-feed defaults. Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well positioned to support. Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me, thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:
latexr 5y ago
> So for fun, I wanted to see how many steps it would take to get the information contained in those alerts into a usable RSS feed. The author did it for fun, but if you ever find yourself in this situation and need a solution fast, consider Kill The Newsletter[1]. Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source[2]. [1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com [2]: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter
- danuker 5y ago
  > Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source > An error occurred during a connection to kill-the-newsletter.com. I guess braving the HN flood takes some nontrivial resources. And there's no such thing as a free lunch.
- sharkjacobs 5y ago
  Kill the Newsletter is great. I'm subscribed to a number of Patreons and last week I got fed up with the lack of RSS feed for non-audio posts, and got the idea to do something sort of like Chris Hardie and bash together a web server which would receive emails and post them to an RSS feed. Very glad I looked around and found Kill the Newsletter before I wasted my weekend!
- layer8 5y ago
  I’d actually like to have the reverse, an RSS-to-email service.
  - silasdb 5y ago
    https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/ https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
  - c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago
    Huginn does this well. https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn
  - latexr 5y ago
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir. Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.
- k1m 5y ago
  I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org https://createfeed.fivefilters.org But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler. It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths. Atom feeds support xml:base explicitly.
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      Oh nice! Thanks for letting me know.
- nijave 5y ago
  I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking. With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization
l72 5y ago
I did something similar for Bandcamp. Back in the day, Bandcamp had decent RSS feeds, but they dropped them several years ago. Following labels on Bandcamp is one of my main ways of music discovery, but using Bandcamp's "feed" or getting emails wasn't cutting it for me. So, I wrote something simpler using imapfilter to filter Bandcamp emails and convert them to RSS feeds, which I can read with my freshrss self hosted instance. https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/ https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
ctrlaltdylan 5y ago
Instead of hand coding a scraper or subscribing to email driven webhooks, and managing that bespoke code - take a look at Pipedream.com You can chain together low code steps. An email address can be a trigger, or just a simple timer. Then you can post results to Slack/Discord with pre built actions, it's a lot less work. No hosting to worry about either. You just build in the dashboard and the steps are hosted by Pipedream.
charcircuit 5y ago
For the average person email alerts are going to be much more useful than RSS "alerts." Almost everyone uses email where very few people use RSS.
kinduff 5y ago
I love RSS, have my own instance of Miniflux [1] on my Raspberry Pi and I got it connected with Discord and Matrix to read articles on the go. [1]: https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
- lprd 5y ago
  I cancelled my feedbin subscription after installing miniflux. Its been a joy to use and is well written software! Thanks for sharing =)
upofadown 5y ago
My city does email for alerts and RSS for news releases. >But it still locks the information up inside my email inbox, and subjects it to the fragility of email delivery these days; will the town’s email servers be allowed to deliver the message? I think in practice that fragility is mostly Gmail and some of the other big free email providers. Email providers that actually care will normally make it so you can at least get your email reliably.
ianbicking 5y ago
Instead of convincing me of the benefits of RSS, I think you've convinced me that someone should sign up for every government newsletter possible and do something really interesting to present that information to the public. Like maybe I don't just want to know about water alerts in my town, but I'd like to know something about water alerts anywhere in the country. Or when I'm visiting somewhere can I get snowplow alerts without digging through local sites? I imagine there's a lot of interesting stuff in those newsletters that I haven't even considered...
smm11 5y ago
Blogger remains all the world will ever need.
neriymus 5y ago
This is slightly unrelated/related to the author's problem, but I've been working on creating something that can continually scrape websites for updates for me - and tell me when something has changed. Still a WIP, but if anyone's interested: https://fetcher.page https://fetcher.page
- podiki 5y ago
  Looks nice! You might be interested in related tools to build off of, like rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
- silentprog 5y ago
  Cool, this looks a bit like: https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
hactually 5y ago
Does anyone want to try and "fix" RSS? I'd be keen to jump on a chat/email thread about it. I don't think RSS is a bad thing, I think it's just not sexy anymore and the reading experience sucks - it died for me when I stopped using Opera but I do think there's an app/extension plugin play to bring it back. Most newsletters, alerts would be better as content delivered through a push/RSS model. We don't get news delivered by post, email is the wrong medium for broadcast.
- alexmingoia 5y ago
  What, exactly, is wrong with RSS in your opinion? I’m curious as someone who runs a news aggregator + RSS reader (https://sumi.news https://sumi.news).
lvxferre 5y ago
A lot* of the criticism against RSS/Atom that I've seen on the internet boils down to appeal to novelty; both are old, so assumed to be "bad". But hey, they work. They fill a purpose - they warn you about updates in a site that you might want to check out. They do one thing, and do it well; and for me that "one thing" can be new manga series to read, new videos to watch, news from my city's site (it has RSS), so goes on. How exactly would be this "bad"? *"a lot" is not "all".
- bArray 5y ago
  The problem is, RSS is not compatible with a few popular models: 1. Closed platform - Places like Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are dis-incentivized to help you consume content unless they can get you trapped in their UI with your logged in account. 2. Web as a program - Tonnes of people are trying to replace websites with 'apps' and replace programs with the web, neither of which lend themselves nicely to being RSS friendly. 3. RSS popularity - Very few people (compared to the majority of the web) are consuming RSS. Most users will be using Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge only. They get their notifications by keeping tabs open or via push notifications. I think the way forwards is to normalise RSS by rebuilding it into the web. I've often thought about what and RSS-based social media may look like. It's a shame Open Graph [1] didn't use more RSS functionality. [1] https://ogp.me/ https://ogp.me/
  - i67vw3 5y ago
    I get twitter feeds by RSS. I use https://nitter.net https://nitter.net which is a privacy focused proxy for twitter. It has an in-built RSS feature. Eg., https://nitter.net/jack/rss https://nitter.net/jack/rss, original account https://nitter.net/jack https://nitter.net/jack. If this instance does not work, then try https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack and https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack/rss https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack/rss. And if you also need reply tweets, then https://nitter.net/jack/with_replies/rss https://nitter.net/jack/with_replies/rss. For Youtube, reddit is also possible, might be for spotify too. For Meta owned social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, I don't think it can be done. Your point 2 and 3 are valid and true.
YaBomm 5y ago
oxplot 5y ago
I've been sending RSS feeds to my email since 2015, around the time that Google Reader was sunset. Advantages of doing this vs. using a dedicated app: - I have well designed email readers on all platforms I use (web mail on desktop, app on mobile devices) which I'm used to. Feeds get labeled separately and don't pollute the inbox. - I can forward emails, archive them, search through them, print them with ease. - They are backed up as part of my existing backup process. - Email is here to stay. Dedicated apps are a gamble. I run my self-made feed forwarder on Github Actions cron schedule [1]. I used existing tools (e.g. rss2email) but each had so many quirks, bugs and outright obnoxious behavior that I decided to just roll my own simple one. > make sure to include a simple RSS feed and a way for your users to discover it. There are ways around no RSS. I have a simple rssgen [2] relay which uses CSS selectors to build an RSS from an HTML page. You can then point your feed reader to it. [1]: https://github.com/oxplot/frider https://github.com/oxplot/frider [2]: https://github.com/oxplot/rssgen https://github.com/oxplot/rssgen
langsoul-com 5y ago
RSS might be cool, but it's strategically bad for the blogger. My blog[1] stands to gain nothing from a RSS feed. It'll just be extra work. Compared to reading on the site, then I can ask for donations or do ads. Or newsletter, where I can direct others to support me. [1]: https://langsoul.com https://langsoul.com
john61 5y ago
For this I use I cron job and a bash script which curls sites I want to watch and grep them for content that I am interested in. It diffs to the last check and if there is one, mails the diff and the url to me.
jer0me 5y ago
Slightly related, but IIRC WordPress has a native feature that allows you to create posts by email. If it’s not WordPress, it might have been a plugin, Blogger, or WP.com.

259 points by ChrisHardie 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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hutattedonmyarm 5y ago

I have a similar problem: I'd love to have all of my Patreon posts in my RSS reader instead of their shitty app or website. That's sadly not possible. So I'm automatically redirecting all of my Patreon emails to my RSS hosted - which does provide an "email to RSS" feature. It's not perfect, but it works fairly well

kevincox 5y ago

I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down". Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you know you want the feed, so spam is almost a non-issue. However I have seen it the other way where my feed reader is blocked because they have "bot protection" on the RSS feed. This can be called a misconfiguration, but it is a common misconfiguration, and there will always be some level of protection on a feed because in the case of DoS you want to try to filter out the attackers. I guess for something this urgent you can configure your reader to alert you on failures to check but that is not even supported by a lot of readers. The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere. The main advantage of email is that it is natively push, so the updates will almost always be faster (greylisting aside...). This can be resolved with WebSub but support for that is very rare. At the end of the day they are both open protocols and you can handle them however you want, although the infrastructure for RSS is probably more inline with this use case. But then again, I read my RSS feeds via email anyways, so I'm probably biased. My proposal? Support both. RSS is trivial to add support for, and if you have an RSS feed you can add a "subscribe by email" form in a couple clicks using existing services. And overall these public alerts are a seriously unsolved problem. When I lived in Dublin, IE there was a water advisory like this and their only notification mechanism was TV+radio. As with most people under the age of 30 I don't frequently listen to TV or radio so could have been drinking contaminated water for days. I was shocked that they didn't send out a cell-based emergency alert for everyone in the area. But even that wouldn't have caught everything. It would be amazing if my city, province and country all had emergency alerts that I could subscribe to via RSS and email.

karencarits 5y ago
I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to keep an archive of important stuff
- gowld 5y ago
  Richard Stallman browses the web via email. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation). > perfect to keep an archive of important stuff Most stuff is not important.
- bandie91 5y ago
  at least Delta Chat[1] builds Instant Messaging on the email infrastructure. [1] https://delta.chat https://delta.chat
spicybright 5y ago
Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS is worth it for emergency alerts. I'm willing to bet good money <0.5% of the population even use or are aware of RSS. Supporting it also has a very non-trivial cost. Even if it takes a few hours for an engineer to implement it, it'll need to be added to their testing plan to make sure it's reliable. Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails. So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line, so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same way existing emergency systems are.

Daunk 5y ago

I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get based on tags. One tag might give an actual toast notification, one might just be highlighted, others might be dimmed and marked as "uninteresting" and some might be straight up hidden. So far I've not found a single RSS reader I like and they all just sort of act like a basic email client, and usually don't do cross-platform either.

nefitty 5y ago
Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.
stevekemp 5y ago
I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for reading feeds. I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon regular expressions, and similar things. It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or article. Those are a bit harder to handle.
- Naac 5y ago
  There is also the much more complete rss2email tool ( originally started by Aaron Swartz ) https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
LanternLight83 5y ago
I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple & Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of custom styles and support for per-feed defaults. Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well positioned to support. Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me, thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:

latexr 5y ago

> So for fun, I wanted to see how many steps it would take to get the information contained in those alerts into a usable RSS feed. The author did it for fun, but if you ever find yourself in this situation and need a solution fast, consider Kill The Newsletter[1]. Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source[2]. [1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com [2]: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter

danuker 5y ago
> Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source > An error occurred during a connection to kill-the-newsletter.com. I guess braving the HN flood takes some nontrivial resources. And there's no such thing as a free lunch.
sharkjacobs 5y ago
Kill the Newsletter is great. I'm subscribed to a number of Patreons and last week I got fed up with the lack of RSS feed for non-audio posts, and got the idea to do something sort of like Chris Hardie and bash together a web server which would receive emails and post them to an RSS feed. Very glad I looked around and found Kill the Newsletter before I wasted my weekend!
layer8 5y ago
I’d actually like to have the reverse, an RSS-to-email service.
- silasdb 5y ago
  https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/ https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
- c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago
  Huginn does this well. https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn
- latexr 5y ago

hombre_fatal 5y ago

Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir. Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.

k1m 5y ago
I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org https://createfeed.fivefilters.org But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.
3pt14159 5y ago
I dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler. It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths. Atom feeds support xml:base explicitly.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Oh nice! Thanks for letting me know.
nijave 5y ago
I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking. With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization

l72 5y ago

I did something similar for Bandcamp. Back in the day, Bandcamp had decent RSS feeds, but they dropped them several years ago. Following labels on Bandcamp is one of my main ways of music discovery, but using Bandcamp's "feed" or getting emails wasn't cutting it for me. So, I wrote something simpler using imapfilter to filter Bandcamp emails and convert them to RSS feeds, which I can read with my freshrss self hosted instance. https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/ https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

ctrlaltdylan 5y ago

Instead of hand coding a scraper or subscribing to email driven webhooks, and managing that bespoke code - take a look at Pipedream.com You can chain together low code steps. An email address can be a trigger, or just a simple timer. Then you can post results to Slack/Discord with pre built actions, it's a lot less work. No hosting to worry about either. You just build in the dashboard and the steps are hosted by Pipedream.

charcircuit 5y ago

For the average person email alerts are going to be much more useful than RSS "alerts." Almost everyone uses email where very few people use RSS.

kinduff 5y ago

I love RSS, have my own instance of Miniflux [1] on my Raspberry Pi and I got it connected with Discord and Matrix to read articles on the go. [1]: https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/

lprd 5y ago
I cancelled my feedbin subscription after installing miniflux. Its been a joy to use and is well written software! Thanks for sharing =)

upofadown 5y ago

My city does email for alerts and RSS for news releases. >But it still locks the information up inside my email inbox, and subjects it to the fragility of email delivery these days; will the town’s email servers be allowed to deliver the message? I think in practice that fragility is mostly Gmail and some of the other big free email providers. Email providers that actually care will normally make it so you can at least get your email reliably.

ianbicking 5y ago

Instead of convincing me of the benefits of RSS, I think you've convinced me that someone should sign up for every government newsletter possible and do something really interesting to present that information to the public. Like maybe I don't just want to know about water alerts in my town, but I'd like to know something about water alerts anywhere in the country. Or when I'm visiting somewhere can I get snowplow alerts without digging through local sites? I imagine there's a lot of interesting stuff in those newsletters that I haven't even considered...

smm11 5y ago

Blogger remains all the world will ever need.

neriymus 5y ago

This is slightly unrelated/related to the author's problem, but I've been working on creating something that can continually scrape websites for updates for me - and tell me when something has changed. Still a WIP, but if anyone's interested: https://fetcher.page https://fetcher.page

podiki 5y ago
Looks nice! You might be interested in related tools to build off of, like rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
silentprog 5y ago
Cool, this looks a bit like: https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

hactually 5y ago

Does anyone want to try and "fix" RSS? I'd be keen to jump on a chat/email thread about it. I don't think RSS is a bad thing, I think it's just not sexy anymore and the reading experience sucks - it died for me when I stopped using Opera but I do think there's an app/extension plugin play to bring it back. Most newsletters, alerts would be better as content delivered through a push/RSS model. We don't get news delivered by post, email is the wrong medium for broadcast.

alexmingoia 5y ago
What, exactly, is wrong with RSS in your opinion? I’m curious as someone who runs a news aggregator + RSS reader (https://sumi.news https://sumi.news).

lvxferre 5y ago

A lot* of the criticism against RSS/Atom that I've seen on the internet boils down to appeal to novelty; both are old, so assumed to be "bad". But hey, they work. They fill a purpose - they warn you about updates in a site that you might want to check out. They do one thing, and do it well; and for me that "one thing" can be new manga series to read, new videos to watch, news from my city's site (it has RSS), so goes on. How exactly would be this "bad"? *"a lot" is not "all".

bArray 5y ago
The problem is, RSS is not compatible with a few popular models: 1. Closed platform - Places like Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are dis-incentivized to help you consume content unless they can get you trapped in their UI with your logged in account. 2. Web as a program - Tonnes of people are trying to replace websites with 'apps' and replace programs with the web, neither of which lend themselves nicely to being RSS friendly. 3. RSS popularity - Very few people (compared to the majority of the web) are consuming RSS. Most users will be using Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge only. They get their notifications by keeping tabs open or via push notifications. I think the way forwards is to normalise RSS by rebuilding it into the web. I've often thought about what and RSS-based social media may look like. It's a shame Open Graph [1] didn't use more RSS functionality. [1] https://ogp.me/ https://ogp.me/
- i67vw3 5y ago
  I get twitter feeds by RSS. I use https://nitter.net https://nitter.net which is a privacy focused proxy for twitter. It has an in-built RSS feature. Eg., https://nitter.net/jack/rss https://nitter.net/jack/rss, original account https://nitter.net/jack https://nitter.net/jack. If this instance does not work, then try https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack and https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack/rss https://nitter.kavin.rocks/jack/rss. And if you also need reply tweets, then https://nitter.net/jack/with_replies/rss https://nitter.net/jack/with_replies/rss. For Youtube, reddit is also possible, might be for spotify too. For Meta owned social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, I don't think it can be done. Your point 2 and 3 are valid and true.

YaBomm 5y ago

oxplot 5y ago

I've been sending RSS feeds to my email since 2015, around the time that Google Reader was sunset. Advantages of doing this vs. using a dedicated app: - I have well designed email readers on all platforms I use (web mail on desktop, app on mobile devices) which I'm used to. Feeds get labeled separately and don't pollute the inbox. - I can forward emails, archive them, search through them, print them with ease. - They are backed up as part of my existing backup process. - Email is here to stay. Dedicated apps are a gamble. I run my self-made feed forwarder on Github Actions cron schedule [1]. I used existing tools (e.g. rss2email) but each had so many quirks, bugs and outright obnoxious behavior that I decided to just roll my own simple one. > make sure to include a simple RSS feed and a way for your users to discover it. There are ways around no RSS. I have a simple rssgen [2] relay which uses CSS selectors to build an RSS from an HTML page. You can then point your feed reader to it. [1]: https://github.com/oxplot/frider https://github.com/oxplot/frider [2]: https://github.com/oxplot/rssgen https://github.com/oxplot/rssgen

langsoul-com 5y ago

RSS might be cool, but it's strategically bad for the blogger. My blog[1] stands to gain nothing from a RSS feed. It'll just be extra work. Compared to reading on the site, then I can ask for donations or do ads. Or newsletter, where I can direct others to support me. [1]: https://langsoul.com https://langsoul.com

john61 5y ago

For this I use I cron job and a bash script which curls sites I want to watch and grep them for content that I am interested in. It diffs to the last check and if there is one, mails the diff and the url to me.

jer0me 5y ago

Slightly related, but IIRC WordPress has a native feature that allows you to create posts by email. If it’s not WordPress, it might have been a plugin, Blogger, or WP.com.