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I love that you did this. Good work. I intend to use it, and look at the code as well. It does raise ethical concerns. Obviously, the folks aren't selling a

I love that you did this. Good work. I intend to use it, and look at the code as well. It does raise ethical concerns. Obviously, the folks aren't selling any advertising, if we're accessing their site content another way... Which, as you correctly state, is exactly what RSS already allows. I've never understood why people put RSS feeds on their blogs. It's insanity. Give people a way to NOT come to my site and view my ads. Fine if ads are not your model, but for 95% of blogs, ads are the model. RSS is a fad, and eventually, saner heads will prevail. Until that time comes, as you say, you're presenting the same info that an RSS feed does, but with the benefit of having been ranked and vetted by the HN community first.

Jebdm 17y ago
RSS may go away, but something better will take its place. People put RSS on their blogs for multiple reasons. I use it on mine because it greatly increases the usability of my site. Another way it helps is that it makes sites "stickier"; without RSS, people would not have something automatically telling them "Hey, that site you liked updated! Go check it out!". They would have to either remember the URL, or remember a link path to the site, or bookmark it, and they'd have to periodically check back. (Not that I particularly care—while it is nice to have readers, I write mainly for my own amusement, and my site is not commercialized at all.) And I think that these two factors are a net win for most sites, whether commercial or not. There are ways around the advertising issue—offer truncated feeds, put ads in your feeds, provoke comments, etc. Plus, I thought that the known wisdom was that regular readers don't use ads much, it's the ones that stumble onto your site from Google, etc.? I haven't seen a study, though. Also, for the record, I basically don't check sites that don't offer RSS. If it's particularly good, it'll get bookmarked, and maybe I'll come back to it in a few months when I've got some free time. But most sites don't even get bookmarked. On the other hand, if I find a site that had a good article, I'll often add it to my RSS reader on a trial basis.

Jebdm 17y ago

RSS may go away, but something better will take its place. People put RSS on their blogs for multiple reasons. I use it on mine because it greatly increases the usability of my site. Another way it helps is that it makes sites "stickier"; without RSS, people would not have something automatically telling them "Hey, that site you liked updated! Go check it out!". They would have to either remember the URL, or remember a link path to the site, or bookmark it, and they'd have to periodically check back. (Not that I particularly care—while it is nice to have readers, I write mainly for my own amusement, and my site is not commercialized at all.) And I think that these two factors are a net win for most sites, whether commercial or not. There are ways around the advertising issue—offer truncated feeds, put ads in your feeds, provoke comments, etc. Plus, I thought that the known wisdom was that regular readers don't use ads much, it's the ones that stumble onto your site from Google, etc.? I haven't seen a study, though. Also, for the record, I basically don't check sites that don't offer RSS. If it's particularly good, it'll get bookmarked, and maybe I'll come back to it in a few months when I've got some free time. But most sites don't even get bookmarked. On the other hand, if I find a site that had a good article, I'll often add it to my RSS reader on a trial basis.