
How do you, personally, receive notifications when people blog? - jamieweb
RSS, subscribe via email, IFTTT, just check the blog regularly, something else?
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deanmoriarty
Absolutely RSS, my whole news consumption process depends on it, I hate
polling for stuff. Thankfully, the vast majority of blogs still provide RSS,
even if a bit hidden sometimes.

I even consume HN via RSS: I have separate RSS feeds for items that reach 50,
250 and 1000 points, respectively.

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jamieweb
Interesting setup, which reader do you use?

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deanmoriarty
Feedly, works pretty well for my use case (I heavily rely on the iOS app since
I tend to read news while on the go).

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jamieweb
I've not really looked at Feedly before - do you use a paid plan?

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deanmoriarty
I use the free one but I’ve been using it for a long time so I’m grandfathered
in the original free plan with unlimited sources. As of today I have ~500
feeds which I subscribe to, I think for new accounts the free limit is much
lower.

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jamieweb
~500 feeds! That must keep you busy!

I'm working on increasing subscriptions on my blog - do you frequently see the
"Subscribe on Feedly" buttons, and if so do you use them? Or are they not
useful?

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deanmoriarty
Haha luckily most of those feeds are pretty inactive, maybe a post a month or
so, which is exactly why RSS feeds are so essential, I can keep the pulse on a
massive source of good content.

I don't think I'd use a "subscribe on feedly" button, typically I just copy
and paste the URL into feedly and it automatically scrapes the RSS feed, if it
exists. Sometimes I manually copy the RSS link directly from the website, when
exposed.

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jamieweb
Do you expect the RSS feed to contain the entire article so that you can read
it all entirely within Feedly? Or does RSS only need to have a summary and
then a link to the full article?

I know that some blogs put their full articles in the RSS feed, so you can
just read it directly in your RSS viewer, email notification, etc. I've tried
doing this too but since my blog is 100% bespoke PHP (i.e. it's not WordPress
or some other big platform), it's not easy to do. When I write an article, I'm
literally writing raw HTML with some included PHP functions to stick the
navbar and footer on. It's not easy to get this into an RSS feed as you can
imagine...

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deanmoriarty
A brief summary is enough, I always jump from feedly into Chrome for the
articles I'll read.

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jamieweb
Thanks for your help with this. :)

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HaoZeke
Sadly on most cases there isn't much else to do than to check back every now
and again.

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Rjevski
Here's a product idea. A service that would automatically screen-scrape any
URL of a blog (using heuristics and/or machine learning to figure out the
layout and where the posts are) and then outputs an RSS feed.

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st3fan
Reeder.app on macOS and iOS.

