6 ms·

RSS Server Side Reader

46 points by Bogdanp 1y ago

quaintdev 1y ago
I read the entire article and I still have no idea what author was trying to achieve.
- onli 1y ago
  Instead of a regular RSS reader he wanted to only get a notification when some target sites have new entries. He opted to implement an expanded blogroll, one that also shows the last three entries.
  - apgwoz 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - ehutch79 1y ago
    I feel like per site notifications, or muting low priority feeds, should be table stakes?
geoffeg 1y ago
I love that we're rediscovering server side rendering. It's impressive to me how quickly the industry moved away from it as the default and is now an interesting, new technique to many.
- rglullis 1y ago
  Except this has nothing to do with Server side rendering.
  - timothyisonline 1y ago
    What makes you say this? A server is rendering/outputting HTML as output from a GitHub action that builds via Deno. Did you think your browser was assembling the HTML?
    - rglullis 1y ago
      By that logic, a static site generator is "Server Side Rendering".
      - timothyisonline 1y ago
        Rendered once, yeah. Not sure why you’re splitting hairs when the client still isn’t doing the work.
        rglullis 1y ago
        If I were really splitting hairs, I'd say that the "rendering" (i.e, transforming the encoded data into its visual representation) can only happen in the client. But anyway, regardless of what you want to call it: this whole thing is just a silly exercise to get a bunch of XML and transform into (X)HTML. If it works for them... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DannyPage 1y ago
Interesting idea, but it mentions the idea of notifications. Is the notification when happens to be new article is at the top on the page? Or is there an external service he forgot to metnion?
rglullis 1y ago
Tell me you are JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel, without telling me you are a JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel: - "RSS is for notifications". No, it's for content syndication. It is right there in the name. - "XML is complicated, JSON Feed is better". Oh, dear Lord, forgive him for he has no idea what he is saying. - "Lets ignore all the gazillion libraries for and tools for parsing and processing OPML, Atom and XML so that we can build a system that depends on deno a f*cking GitHub actions"
- timeon 1y ago
  AFAIK author is not JavaScript developer.
  - matklad 1y ago
    I used to do frontend development ([1], [2]), now I am more of a database person ([3]), though it mostly is just prompting llvm to generate the right code! [1] https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust [2] https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer [3] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/ https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/
    - timeon 1y ago
      > prompting llvm to generate the right code! Hehe I almost missed 'v'.
- dqv 1y ago
  Did you ask AI to make a roast? I'm genuinely asking. It looks sensible to me. He's using two tools he was already using: Deno and GitHub. And he's using this RSS library: https://deno.land/x/rss@1.1.2 https://deno.land/x/rss@1.1.2 And he can always run that command without GitHub Actions if necessary or desired.
p0w3n3d 1y ago
I remember using RSS heavily around 2007-2013 but is this still a thing?
- galleywest200 1y ago
  I use RSS very frequently, it is often how I get my daily news. Most blogs, at least in the tech space, have it. As well any major news publication worth their salt will have an RSS feed still.
- pwenzel 1y ago
  Heck yeah! I use an RSS reader to consume news every day on both my phone and laptop. It's blissfully free of extras and distraction.
- jasonfrost 1y ago
  Using rn to access HN
- quantadev 1y ago
  Definitely! Advertisers hate it, because it's a way of basically bypassing ADs. I used to have my own RSS reader doing what the OP's doing, but I finally just started using Liferea (on Linux) which I love. There's a file format for sharing links called "opml", and here's mine for example (below). Many RSS readers can import/export your list of links to this format. Each day there's about 150 new articles to scroll thru. What we need in the world however is some sort of OPML Sharing social media service where people can share their FAVs. It's a shame news sites are heading in the opposite direction with closed paywalls rather than openness, but I guess they're struggling to pay the bills. My apologies for posting such a big chunk of text and eating up half your screen. I only do this when I'm pretty sure it's relevant. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Liferea Feed List Export</title> </head> <body> <outline title="Example Feeds" text="Example Feeds" description="Example Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="News" text="News" description="News" type="folder"> <outline title="Ars Technica" text="Ars Technica" description="Ars Technica" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index" htmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com"/ https://arstechnica.com"/> <outline title="Reddit - World News" text="Reddit - World News" description="Reddit - World News" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss" htmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/> <outline title="NPR World" text="NPR World" description="NPR World" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/ https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/> <outline title="Simon Willison's Weblog" text="Simon Willison's Weblog" description="Simon Willison's Weblog" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/" htmlUrl="http://simonwillison.net/"/ http://simonwillison.net/"/> </outline> </outline> </outline> </body> </opml>
AndyKelley 1y ago
HN seems to be having trouble understanding why this is brilliant. Ignore the parts about JSON/XML. That's irrelevant. Problem: you want an RSS reader, but RSS readers are annoying because they are stateful and you have to try to sync them across devices. Or, as in the case of Google Reader they may be discontinued. Best case, you have a dependency on a third party application. Solution: make a web page on your personal site that aggregates links from your RSS feeds. This is handy because you can now simply access your own web site as an RSS reader. As a side benefit, you can share this page with your friends to help them find nice links, and help promote stuff that you like to search engines.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
  Problem: you want to read your RSS feeds, but you aren't online. Solution: use something like The Old Reader, which aggregates online, and can also be synced with an app like GReader for offline reading.
  - graemep 1y ago
    When are you ever offline these days though?
    - gerikson 1y ago
      When travelling by air it's nice to have a bunch of feeds to read.
      - OptionOfT 1y ago
        I have found significant issues with this. Many websites don't offer the full article on their RSS feed. For example Ars Technica. I use miniflux, and it only shows me the first paragraph. Using the Download button in miniflux to download the whole article does nothing.
        nickthegreek 1y ago
tolerance 1y ago
It looks like Dave Winer built something similar. https://blogroll.social https://blogroll.social http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator.html http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator...
walterbell 1y ago
On iOS, lire caches RSS-syndicated articles and images for offline reading. One-time purchase, no subscription. There's also OSS NetNewsWire.
- m-localhost 1y ago
  lire is great. Ditched my Feedly lifetime sub for self-hosted FreshRSS and lire and I'm reading my RSS feeds again.
rpdillon 1y ago
I'm a GReader refugee that migrated to TT-RSS, and then FreshRSS. But somewhere in there, I wrote my own version of this same idea: pulling RSS feeds server side via cron every several hours and rendering a rollup. Never put the code online, but here's a paste of it if anyone is interested. I called it "Cooler" since it was designed to surface good water cooler chat topics. It's just a single Python script with a couple of dependencies. https://textbin.net/kdhkz0nnyx https://textbin.net/kdhkz0nnyx It tracks no state, but does color by source, and fades with age so you get a good feel of what site the post came from and how long ago. I had an idea to version control the static HTML after it was generated, so you could rewind time and see what the top stories were, but haven't gotten around to it. If anyone cares, I'll host the full repo and share.
sebastian_honsa 1y ago
I've made https://rosselo.com https://rosselo.com exactly for being a RSS server side dashboard of news. Feel free to try it out, it's completely free for now and upcoming future!
jrm4 1y ago
Yup. I'm no programmer by any stretch, but I wrote my own crappy little thing years ago and I still use it nearly daily. One thing I realized is that everything else I used had too many features; one I really never ever wanted was a count of what I had and hadn't read. I'd rather use RSS really as "maybe some days I pick up the newspaper and some I don't" https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss (I don't even remember if this is the last version and make no guarantees about any kind of functionality, but you can get an idea)
susam 1y ago
I did pretty much the same thing last weekend. I have a small Common Lisp program that generates my website. Last weekend, I wrote a new program to generate a blogroll page from a list of feed URLs. You can see the code and the resulting blogroll here: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/roll.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/roll.lisp https://susam.net/roll.html https://susam.net/roll.html This program was directly inspired by @matklad's idea of using a blogroll as an RSS reader. It's only been a few days, but I already feel like I can finally stay on top of my feeds!
eviks 1y ago
> If I don’t remember whether I read the article or not, I might as well re-read! Unless you remember after reading the first paragraph or two, in which case you've just wasted time partially re-reading them. This type of tracking is perfect for offloading to a reliable digital accountant!
- walterbell 1y ago
  > wasted time partially re-reading them Refreshed low-latency cache for spaced repetition and creative working memory.
chazeon 1y ago
The thing is, the publisher are not obligated to show all recent post, some may show 1 some may show 5, but they might publish more than what they show in your refresh interval (e.g. 1 week) In this case, using a stateless reader, you will start to miss article.
rambambram 1y ago
I built and use HeyHomepage.com daily for the same reasons. I love having a list of all kinds of websites (mostly 'dev blogs' from all you guys and gals!) which in it's essence is a list of bookmarks to homepages. I throw RSS techniques against it and it becomes my replacement for social media. I call RSS therefor 'Really Social Sites'. No ads and the quality of the content is completely up to me selecting the right websites to follow. I see only one post from one feed at a time. If I want the next, I click a button labeled 'Next random post' and it gives me the latest post from yet another feed. I only get the first two lines of a new post and then read the full article on the website if I'm interested. There's something to say for paying hommage to a fellow internet user who put work in building a website... I want to read your post on your website or homepage. Expanding on this list I also published (parts of) this list as a sort of blogroll, or shared list. This shared list is viewable and clickable in the browser for regular internet users, and downloadable as an OPML file so RSS users can import the websites that I like and 'endorse'. Also expanding on this list, I built some functionality called Newspaper which automatically (instead of manually) checks some selected feeds that I deemed extra interesting. The different articles from different sources are than presented to me in a newspaper. Every time I log in there are some newspapers waiting for me. I'm always looking forward to the one called 'Cars'. The rest is mostly work stuff. ;) It goes without saying that Hey Homepage is not only an RSS reader, but that it also has functions for your own timeline of posts with accompanying RSS feed. The open web is not dead. You neglected it for too long. It misses you. Give it some love back.
m-localhost 1y ago
Unrelated, bit it's fascinating that the Google Reader API (which is super weird I think) is still the status quo for interacting with feed readers (https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleReader_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...)
renegat0x0 1y ago
For some time I have been playing with RSS and web crawling myself. RSS is not that simple and all common properties are read into a simple JSON data. Maybe somebody will find it useful. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

46 points by Bogdanp 1y ago

quaintdev 1y ago

I read the entire article and I still have no idea what author was trying to achieve.

onli 1y ago
Instead of a regular RSS reader he wanted to only get a notification when some target sites have new entries. He opted to implement an expanded blogroll, one that also shows the last three entries.
- apgwoz 1y ago
  [flagged]
- ehutch79 1y ago
  I feel like per site notifications, or muting low priority feeds, should be table stakes?

geoffeg 1y ago

I love that we're rediscovering server side rendering. It's impressive to me how quickly the industry moved away from it as the default and is now an interesting, new technique to many.

rglullis 1y ago
Except this has nothing to do with Server side rendering.
- timothyisonline 1y ago
  What makes you say this? A server is rendering/outputting HTML as output from a GitHub action that builds via Deno. Did you think your browser was assembling the HTML?
  - rglullis 1y ago
    By that logic, a static site generator is "Server Side Rendering".
    - timothyisonline 1y ago
      Rendered once, yeah. Not sure why you’re splitting hairs when the client still isn’t doing the work.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        If I were really splitting hairs, I'd say that the "rendering" (i.e, transforming the encoded data into its visual representation) can only happen in the client. But anyway, regardless of what you want to call it: this whole thing is just a silly exercise to get a bunch of XML and transform into (X)HTML. If it works for them... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

DannyPage 1y ago

Interesting idea, but it mentions the idea of notifications. Is the notification when happens to be new article is at the top on the page? Or is there an external service he forgot to metnion?

rglullis 1y ago

Tell me you are JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel, without telling me you are a JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel: - "RSS is for notifications". No, it's for content syndication. It is right there in the name. - "XML is complicated, JSON Feed is better". Oh, dear Lord, forgive him for he has no idea what he is saying. - "Lets ignore all the gazillion libraries for and tools for parsing and processing OPML, Atom and XML so that we can build a system that depends on deno a f*cking GitHub actions"

timeon 1y ago
AFAIK author is not JavaScript developer.
- matklad 1y ago
  I used to do frontend development ([1], [2]), now I am more of a database person ([3]), though it mostly is just prompting llvm to generate the right code! [1] https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust [2] https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer [3] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/ https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/
  - timeon 1y ago
    > prompting llvm to generate the right code! Hehe I almost missed 'v'.
dqv 1y ago
Did you ask AI to make a roast? I'm genuinely asking. It looks sensible to me. He's using two tools he was already using: Deno and GitHub. And he's using this RSS library: https://deno.land/x/rss@1.1.2 https://deno.land/x/rss@1.1.2 And he can always run that command without GitHub Actions if necessary or desired.

p0w3n3d 1y ago

I remember using RSS heavily around 2007-2013 but is this still a thing?

galleywest200 1y ago
I use RSS very frequently, it is often how I get my daily news. Most blogs, at least in the tech space, have it. As well any major news publication worth their salt will have an RSS feed still.
pwenzel 1y ago
Heck yeah! I use an RSS reader to consume news every day on both my phone and laptop. It's blissfully free of extras and distraction.
jasonfrost 1y ago
Using rn to access HN
quantadev 1y ago
Definitely! Advertisers hate it, because it's a way of basically bypassing ADs. I used to have my own RSS reader doing what the OP's doing, but I finally just started using Liferea (on Linux) which I love. There's a file format for sharing links called "opml", and here's mine for example (below). Many RSS readers can import/export your list of links to this format. Each day there's about 150 new articles to scroll thru. What we need in the world however is some sort of OPML Sharing social media service where people can share their FAVs. It's a shame news sites are heading in the opposite direction with closed paywalls rather than openness, but I guess they're struggling to pay the bills. My apologies for posting such a big chunk of text and eating up half your screen. I only do this when I'm pretty sure it's relevant. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Liferea Feed List Export</title> </head> <body> <outline title="Example Feeds" text="Example Feeds" description="Example Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="News" text="News" description="News" type="folder"> <outline title="Ars Technica" text="Ars Technica" description="Ars Technica" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index" htmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com"/ https://arstechnica.com"/> <outline title="Reddit - World News" text="Reddit - World News" description="Reddit - World News" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss" htmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/> <outline title="NPR World" text="NPR World" description="NPR World" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/ https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/> <outline title="Simon Willison's Weblog" text="Simon Willison's Weblog" description="Simon Willison's Weblog" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/ https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/" htmlUrl="http://simonwillison.net/"/ http://simonwillison.net/"/> </outline> </outline> </outline> </body> </opml>

AndyKelley 1y ago

HN seems to be having trouble understanding why this is brilliant. Ignore the parts about JSON/XML. That's irrelevant. Problem: you want an RSS reader, but RSS readers are annoying because they are stateful and you have to try to sync them across devices. Or, as in the case of Google Reader they may be discontinued. Best case, you have a dependency on a third party application. Solution: make a web page on your personal site that aggregates links from your RSS feeds. This is handy because you can now simply access your own web site as an RSS reader. As a side benefit, you can share this page with your friends to help them find nice links, and help promote stuff that you like to search engines.

ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
Problem: you want to read your RSS feeds, but you aren't online. Solution: use something like The Old Reader, which aggregates online, and can also be synced with an app like GReader for offline reading.
- graemep 1y ago
  When are you ever offline these days though?
  - gerikson 1y ago
    When travelling by air it's nice to have a bunch of feeds to read.
    - OptionOfT 1y ago
      I have found significant issues with this. Many websites don't offer the full article on their RSS feed. For example Ars Technica. I use miniflux, and it only shows me the first paragraph. Using the Download button in miniflux to download the whole article does nothing.
      - nickthegreek 1y ago

tolerance 1y ago

It looks like Dave Winer built something similar. https://blogroll.social https://blogroll.social http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator.html http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator...

walterbell 1y ago

On iOS, lire caches RSS-syndicated articles and images for offline reading. One-time purchase, no subscription. There's also OSS NetNewsWire.

m-localhost 1y ago
lire is great. Ditched my Feedly lifetime sub for self-hosted FreshRSS and lire and I'm reading my RSS feeds again.

rpdillon 1y ago

I'm a GReader refugee that migrated to TT-RSS, and then FreshRSS. But somewhere in there, I wrote my own version of this same idea: pulling RSS feeds server side via cron every several hours and rendering a rollup. Never put the code online, but here's a paste of it if anyone is interested. I called it "Cooler" since it was designed to surface good water cooler chat topics. It's just a single Python script with a couple of dependencies. https://textbin.net/kdhkz0nnyx https://textbin.net/kdhkz0nnyx It tracks no state, but does color by source, and fades with age so you get a good feel of what site the post came from and how long ago. I had an idea to version control the static HTML after it was generated, so you could rewind time and see what the top stories were, but haven't gotten around to it. If anyone cares, I'll host the full repo and share.

sebastian_honsa 1y ago

I've made https://rosselo.com https://rosselo.com exactly for being a RSS server side dashboard of news. Feel free to try it out, it's completely free for now and upcoming future!

jrm4 1y ago

Yup. I'm no programmer by any stretch, but I wrote my own crappy little thing years ago and I still use it nearly daily. One thing I realized is that everything else I used had too many features; one I really never ever wanted was a count of what I had and hadn't read. I'd rather use RSS really as "maybe some days I pick up the newspaper and some I don't" https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss (I don't even remember if this is the last version and make no guarantees about any kind of functionality, but you can get an idea)

susam 1y ago

I did pretty much the same thing last weekend. I have a small Common Lisp program that generates my website. Last weekend, I wrote a new program to generate a blogroll page from a list of feed URLs. You can see the code and the resulting blogroll here: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/roll.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/roll.lisp https://susam.net/roll.html https://susam.net/roll.html This program was directly inspired by @matklad's idea of using a blogroll as an RSS reader. It's only been a few days, but I already feel like I can finally stay on top of my feeds!

eviks 1y ago

> If I don’t remember whether I read the article or not, I might as well re-read! Unless you remember after reading the first paragraph or two, in which case you've just wasted time partially re-reading them. This type of tracking is perfect for offloading to a reliable digital accountant!

walterbell 1y ago
> wasted time partially re-reading them Refreshed low-latency cache for spaced repetition and creative working memory.

chazeon 1y ago

The thing is, the publisher are not obligated to show all recent post, some may show 1 some may show 5, but they might publish more than what they show in your refresh interval (e.g. 1 week) In this case, using a stateless reader, you will start to miss article.

rambambram 1y ago

I built and use HeyHomepage.com daily for the same reasons. I love having a list of all kinds of websites (mostly 'dev blogs' from all you guys and gals!) which in it's essence is a list of bookmarks to homepages. I throw RSS techniques against it and it becomes my replacement for social media. I call RSS therefor 'Really Social Sites'. No ads and the quality of the content is completely up to me selecting the right websites to follow. I see only one post from one feed at a time. If I want the next, I click a button labeled 'Next random post' and it gives me the latest post from yet another feed. I only get the first two lines of a new post and then read the full article on the website if I'm interested. There's something to say for paying hommage to a fellow internet user who put work in building a website... I want to read your post on your website or homepage. Expanding on this list I also published (parts of) this list as a sort of blogroll, or shared list. This shared list is viewable and clickable in the browser for regular internet users, and downloadable as an OPML file so RSS users can import the websites that I like and 'endorse'. Also expanding on this list, I built some functionality called Newspaper which automatically (instead of manually) checks some selected feeds that I deemed extra interesting. The different articles from different sources are than presented to me in a newspaper. Every time I log in there are some newspapers waiting for me. I'm always looking forward to the one called 'Cars'. The rest is mostly work stuff. ;) It goes without saying that Hey Homepage is not only an RSS reader, but that it also has functions for your own timeline of posts with accompanying RSS feed. The open web is not dead. You neglected it for too long. It misses you. Give it some love back.

m-localhost 1y ago

Unrelated, bit it's fascinating that the Google Reader API (which is super weird I think) is still the status quo for interacting with feed readers (https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleReader_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...)

renegat0x0 1y ago

For some time I have been playing with RSS and web crawling myself. RSS is not that simple and all common properties are read into a simple JSON data. Maybe somebody will find it useful. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy