
Please Add RSS Support to Your Site - kevq
https://kevq.uk/please-add-rss-support-to-your-site
======
AndrewStephens
I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS
is the backbone of blogging.

It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications -
hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at
my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then.

In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like
Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be
the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see
it return.

Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was
RSS[0].

[0] [https://sheep.horse/rss.xml](https://sheep.horse/rss.xml)

~~~
smush
> In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like
> Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines.

We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics
said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to
use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/

I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the
same.

~~~
orf
Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use
case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-
rss/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/)

Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed
settings and much slower security updates.

~~~
hobs
Why - they work fine, they dont change, they dont add a burden to the existing
product?

Taking something that works out of your product doesnt ever make people happy,
and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.

Its a "well that's ok that we wont take this on anymore and let those users
manage their own problem" use case.

~~~
orf
> they dont add a burden to the existing product?

I assume you work in tech, maybe even as a developer. So you know full well
that every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a
maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.

> and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.

It absolutely is, if it makes those features better and gives them a focused
place to develop outside of the core browser.

If you're so upset about it literally go and press one big blue "Add to
firefox" button and have all the previous features, and more, back in under 10
seconds.

~~~
jolmg
Yet Pocket is a core part of Firefox instead of an extension.

~~~
orf
That's because Mozilla literally owns Pocket, and sure, it's also perfect for
an extension. So you can see why they might be willing to take on that
_maintenance burden_ for an uptick in usage.

And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of
any relevance at all.

~~~
jolmg
The relevance is that you said

> Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect
> use case. [...] every single unused line of code, let alone an entire
> feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.

And the same holds true for Pocket.

~~~
orf
It's not the same thing. At all.

Pocket is used by people and is a feature Mozilla want to prominently
integrate with Firefox. This is due to the financial gains they directly get
when someone signs up for Pocket premium.

It's not an unused, dusty feature that's adding a burden to the platform and
is a net time + money sink. _It 's something that makes them money_.

As I said, in the comment you just replied to, even if nobody did use pocket
then this would be a burden they are willing to take. So, comparing RSS feeds
to pocket on the fact that it can be implemented as an extension alone is a
nonsensical point.

~~~
gregknicholson
Pocket directly competes against the open web (in the form of RSS/Atom). If
Mozilla was a values-based organisation they would be promoting the open web
at least as much as they promote their own proprietary system.

~~~
ryacko
If Mozilla offered a browser that people could pay for without having default
settings to maximize revenue, the open web could be maintained.

------
ddrager
Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I
ended up removing RSS from my blog:

1\. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any
more as a daily reader^1.

2\. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my
blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each
with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked
higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on
and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole.

3\. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to
monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1.

As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business
standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days.

^1:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss%20feed)

~~~
technotarek
To address #3, provide only the title and a very brief excerpt in your feed
with a link to the full _monetized_ post.

~~~
chii
Except now your readers have to click out of the RSS reader, rather than stay
in there and read. I find it jarring and obtrusive to do that, and prefer just
to visit the site instead if they RSS did this.

~~~
Semaphor
I usually prefer that as well, but if the choice is no RSS and
headline+excerpt RSS, I’m absolutely fine with the latter. Without RSS I won’t
read any regular content.

------
djhworld
I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non
existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice
(newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before
heading home.

Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles
with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue
reading the full article.

I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater
opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow.

A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits
each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out
the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS
feed for my client to subscribe to.

I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal
implications of it

~~~
danShumway
As someone who hand-codes their RSS feeds and doesn't include article content
at all (just a title/link/description), what's the recommended setup for this?

Can I just spit the raw HTML at you? Do I need to inline images? I'm assuming
that someone who's consuming a full feed isn't going to want any CSS included.

I'm not against this, but I'm also hand-coding all of my blogs, and this seems
like a problem that would be more easily and more consistently solved by a
user-run service like the one you've made. I don't know what readers currently
support, and I'm looking around quickly on DuckDuckGo and not seeing many
resources about generating full-text feeds that don't boil down to, "click the
button in Wordpress."

Again, I have no problem supporting this, but if I'm going to put the time in
to change my blogs, I kind of need more prodding than just one or two people
saying it annoys them. I don't have any specific reason I wouldn't want to
accommodate people like you -- I'm not advertising on my blogs and I don't
have any analytics, so I don't care where you read. But I don't want to invest
a lot of time into building a completely new content pipeline.

~~~
AndrewStephens
> I'm not advertising on my blogs

Perhaps you should, I enjoyed finding stuff like this :
[https://danshumway.com/blog/gamasutra-
vulnerabilities/](https://danshumway.com/blog/gamasutra-vulnerabilities/)

~~~
sduff
Agree that that is an awesome article.

Suggest you include the posting date on that page, as reading it, I wasn't
sure how recent the info was. I was then shocked to find that these
vulnerabilities were identified late last year. Some of these are security
101!

~~~
danShumway
I didn't realize I wasn't attaching dates to posts, I will add those under the
page headers.

This is off-topic at this point, but I still stand by the ending to that post
-- Gamasutra did reach out to me and did work with me for a little while to
fix some of the issues, but eventually communication fell off.

I didn't re-check to validate that the issues were fixed because I felt like I
had done everything that could be expected of me at that point and because,
honestly, the whole thing was really stressful. Even when companies are being
nice (and UBM was _really nice_ about the whole thing), public disclosure is
still scary. You just hear horror stories.

I still recommend that people be cautious using Gamasutra. I only wrote up
specific vulnerabilities that I found accidentally, I didn't pen-test the
site. My point with this article was that the site _needs_ to be pen-tested.
As far as I know, that's never happened.

------
jandrese
RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to
capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities,
and that's the opposite of what they want.

Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.

~~~
bad_user
RSS isn't dead.

Smart bloggers will always expose an RSS feed, because readers following your
RSS feed are more likely to read your blog than traffic from other sources.
Having an RSS feed is the slightly weaker version of the mailing lists. Mail
which is also going strong — and the easiest way to build a mailing list btw,
is to connect your RSS feed to Mailchimp.

And RSS feeds are mandatory for podcasts too.

Some blogs choose not to expose RSS feeds of course, but they do so at their
own loss. This is because some people are not interested in expanding their
audience, they just want to publish some stuff from time to time. And that's
totally fine.

> _Plus it 's difficult to monetize an RSS feed. _

An RSS feed can include just summaries that redirect users to your website.
And I actually prefer summaries because I don't want to mess with CSS stuff.

Of course you can monetize it, from where did you get the impression that you
can't?

~~~
lbatista
RSS died when Google Reader died.

~~~
clintonb
Not really. RSS is still on nearly every WordPress site. I simply switches
from Google Reader to Feedly.

------
SamWhited
Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed
correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should
feel bad if you're using) _finally_ added RSS feeds, but I still have to try
and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not
linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.

~~~
jeena
I have the problem that those meta links are kind of useless nowadays because
Firefox removed the possibility to use Navigator.registerContentHandler() so I
could redirect from the Feed button in the Firefox UI to TT-RSS. Now the
button in the UI let's me download the Feed resource which doesn't make sense.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I believe the rss:// protocol could (still can?) be used to shell out to your
reader.

~~~
jeena
Nobody uses the rss:// protocol in their <link>.

------
kgwxd
I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any
personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to
content; everything in 1 place.

I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their
content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But
that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because
of it.

~~~
rtkwe
I wonder if it's also because reading content on an RSS reader doesn't
generally allow ads and tracking to be added.

~~~
kgwxd
I don't think that's it. Almost every major site has RSS, but it's usually
just headlines, which I think is fine.

------
rcarmo
Funny how RSS managed to take off originally by focusing on discoverability
(education about meta tags, the infamous orange “broadcasting” icon, etc.) and
these days it’s still plagued by lack of discoverability or misunderstandings
as to its use and reach.

All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through
roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is
very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default
way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news
and other info.

When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or
sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly
seems to be the most popular).

I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in
comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds,
which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch
the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”).

In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources
carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.

------
revicon
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I
get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship
has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your
blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social
networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post.

After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit
feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in
most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was
a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed.
This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered
to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the
case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it
up.

~~~
netsensei
Hypothesis: most users on social media wouldn't publish or share content, let
alone leverage RSS, if those platforms didn't exist.

Social media emerged alongside existing technologies. And they attracted a
whole new audience. Of course, there's been a migration from former self
hosted users towards those social media.

An apt comparison is IRC. It existed for decades now, but the concept of an
office group chat never quite got successfully poured into a business model
until Slack came around. Organisations using Slack didn't necessarily shift
away from IRC or other options. They simply didn't use chat until they jumped
on the Slack bandwagon.

I do recall criticisms when GR was unveiled: why use a centralised online
service in order to consume a distributed network of content? At that point,
GR did overtake the market of RSS clients.

Axing GR was the exact turning point for RSS as that happened exactly during
the meteoric rise of social media, leaving many with little alternative to
turn towards social media. Remember that at that point, Big Tech was perceived
as the "Good Guys" and many touted that this was just the natural state of
affairs.

I used to be a heavy RSS user, but when GR got axed, that pretty much fell
away overnight. I never quite got back to using RSS via an alternative.

------
bad_user
I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not
on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website
generator like Jekyll or equivalent.

Some of them don't have RSS feeds.

But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed.

Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a
plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but
any one will do.

Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually
do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the
RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional.

And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the <head>
of all your pages, like:

    
    
        <link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml">
    

[1] [https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-
feed)

[2]
[https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml](https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml)

~~~
alexott
From my experience (as maintainer of a Planet Clojure), some sites have feeds,
but simply don’t expose them via links or meta. I’m usually trying some
standard paths before contacting author: /rss/, /feed/, /atom.xml, etc.

------
Fogest
Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart
from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even
has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their
site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.

~~~
nickthegreek
looks like he added a link to his RSS
([https://kevq.uk/feed](https://kevq.uk/feed)) at the end of the article, but
like you, my RSS reader was unable to locate it naturally.

~~~
Deimorz
It's because he doesn't have one of the rel="alternate" tags that RSS readers
look for: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E) (not
sure why this MDN page is marked as "obsolete").

~~~
type0
Maybe because mozilla removed built in rss support from firefox?

~~~
kgwxd
That's not a Firefox thing, all RSS readers look for that. It's what allows
you to paste the url from, say, a YouTube channel and the reader is able to
find the feed for that channel without knowing anything about how YouTube
fashions their rss urls.

------
bovermyer
If you use Hugo, here's how to add an RSS link to your site. Just add the
following to your <head> area in your template(s):

    
    
        {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "rss" -}}
            {{ printf `<link rel="%s" type="%s" href="%s" title="%s" />` .Rel .MediaType.Type .Permalink $.Site.Title | safeHTML }}
        {{ end -}}
    

Related link:
[https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout](https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout)

------
sonicrocketman
Widespread RSS support is crucial to pushing the open web forward and allowing
the ecosystem to compete with mainstream social networks.

RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues
with it can be mitigated with tooling.

Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t
have is an ITunes style directory.

I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web
that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and
discover so the open web can flourish.

Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and
feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an
API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for
commercial applications).

Feedback always welcome!

Feed Reader [https://pine.blog](https://pine.blog)

Feed Directory [https://pine.blog/search](https://pine.blog/search)

~~~
enz
> RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues
> with it can be mitigated with tooling

Or by using Atom instead of RSS!

Atom is very well supported too. Actually, we sometimes say "RSS" to refer to
a feed whenever it is RSS or Atom.

~~~
sonicrocketman
I typically say “feed” since JSON Feed, Atom, and more fit into that category.

------
sandov
I've never really understood how one is supposed to use RSS.

Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a
glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers
expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web
browser?

I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite
understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I tried.

~~~
pp19dd
Behaviorally, it's a dead practice.

As individuals, we used to look at all content ingested by readers (programs
or Google Reader/feedly) and ourselves cherry-pick the articles, posts we
wanted to see. Like an old newsgroup reader. Gradually that function has moved
into programming beyond your control showing you suggested content filtered
via models that show you only what they think you want to see. Buzzword: AI.
Roll your eyes.

Some sites would provide a teaser, others full content, some would put an
advertiser's message in the body and a catchy title. It was up to the content
maker. Typically there'd always be some reduction in the actual markup/content
itself. Interesting things you really liked you might have clicked into and
seen on the original site for a full experience, fed those people's ads and
analytics. But the bottom line is it all largely interworked.

One of my favorite things was using iGoogle or netvibes because those two
flagships took RSS widgets. Using either custom programming or something like
Yahoo Pipes you could cobble together something useful. Like make your own
google homepage or dashboard containing both your calendar appointments,
filtered gmail, and quirky things like server uptimes, alerts, API usage
limits widgets, fun webcomics.

From a publisher's perspective, RSS is still used to connect disparate
publishing systems together since it's a standard. From one content management
system you can pipe material to a blog widget, to a mobile app endpoint, to a
partner site, to an affiliate. Direct site hosting is down but even now we use
RSS to feed media partners like Facebook instant, Google News producer, Google
News on [Voice] Assistant, twitter (via publish vendor), Apple podcasts
(actually that might be JSON, but maybe wasn't always?), etc.

------
sylk
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's
a preview of what we wrote."

I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to
get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.

~~~
cytzol
> I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to
> get it.

Unfortunately, I like to write my content knowing how it's going to have a
certain appearance and layout, and because this doesn't scale to the narrow
set of HTML allowed in the <description> tag, I don't have anything in there
and just have a link to my site.

There are definitely RSS feeds without content so you have to go to their site
and have adverts thrown at you, yeah, but it's not as simple as flipping a
switch and having readable content in your RSS feeds.

~~~
redwall_hp
...and then I feed it into Reader mode on my phone, or something similar,
because fuck stylesheets in general.

------
paxys
I don't get why everyone here is complaining about RSS dying. It still exists.
Almost every blog platform and news/content website publishes RSS feeds. There
are some great apps for reading feeds on desktop and mobile (including
features like offline syncing). There are a bunch of RSS add-ons for Chrome
and Firefox. Slack natively supports piping feeds into a channel. You can even
build RSS workflows with Zapier or IFTTT.

Yes it isn't the hottest thing in the tech world today, but it doesn't have to
be.

~~~
xtat
Agree with you - I think the problem isn't the lack of widely available feeds
but the harmful sentiment that RSS is somehow obsolete and unnecessary so many
newer well meaning apps don't spend the effort to add it.

------
gjstein
Easy enough to support this article; RSS is good for the open web and
relatively trivial to support: took me maybe an hour for my personal blog,
compared to the enormous effort I've put into CSS and formatting for the
website proper. I'd love to get a feeling for how many folks here have a blog
with RSS support and what the relative level of traffic is between RSS and
other forms of traffic. Does anyone have statistics they'd care to share?

------
latexr
> But I was surprised to learn that many of the blogs that Jan had linked to
> didn't support RSS.

I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not
all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from
the home URL.

Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder
didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no
reference to it. If I didn’t think it odd that the author wasn’t providing a
feed, I wouldn’t have found it.

Blog platforms tend to provide support for RSS feeds because blog platforms
are built by people who care about such things, so even if the writer doesn’t
care, the feed will be there. I’m more worried about the lack of RSS support
in big popular platforms that have no reason to not provide one, such as the
News page on the Epic Games Store[3].

[1]: It may be that some were auto-generated and provided wrong info; I didn’t
verify them in depth.

[2]: [https://www.reederapp.com/](https://www.reederapp.com/)

[3]: [https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-
US/news](https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news)

~~~
Deimorz
I think he doesn't know how the automatic discovery of RSS feeds works, and
just looks for a visual link to one.

Like you said, he missed a lot of them, and isn't linking to his own feed
properly on his site so that RSS readers can find it (with rel="alternate"
and/or type="application/rss+xml").

------
kazinator
Sites don't offer RSS because

\- they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was
in its heyday and don't know what it is.

\- sites operators want to human users to interact with their site
specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote
interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing)
in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been
commoditized and aggregated.

Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern
perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do
it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues
such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into
search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you
offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself.

But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has
the condensed info right there.

~~~
xtat
Dear site operators: enjoy obscurity

------
dwheeler
RSS can be used for more than traditional blogs, too.

The CII Best Practices badge has a "projects" page that lists all projects
working on or achieving a badge:
[https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects)
. You'll notice an RSS symbol; if you click on it, you'll be led to
[https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed)
(in your preferred language) that will show you projects listed in reverse-
latest-edit order (so you can see who's made the latest changes to their badge
info).

Once you start thinking of RSS as a way to tell people "what's new" in a
simple common format, there are lots of interesting uses for it.

------
Shorn
I run a SAAS for forwarding email addresses in order to protect email
addresses by handing out individualised burner addresses that you can block if
people start to abuse them with uninvited mail.

For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked
emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my
service.

I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam,
github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those
addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that
stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my
inbox.

There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure
about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own
domain to avoid being locked in to my service.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service_

If it's relevant - and I mean, it actually adds to the discussion, and not
just matches the keywords for which you try to adveritse it - then it's fine
to mention your service. We're all interested in discovering new stuff here.

------
jdofaz
Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS.
They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not
available on Apple News"

~~~
freehunter
iOS these days has a major problem of allowing webpages to redirect
automatically to the app or worse, to the App Store.

Every now and again I have to fight Amazon to let me open a link in Safari
instead of the Amazon app. Generally it's because I cannot purchase the item
inside of the app (digital content like movies and Kindle books), but they
still automatically open the app and make me do a dance to get it in Safari.
Same thing with Yelp, under no circumstances am I ever able to get a Yelp link
to open on their website. YouTube does the same thing, and I've had Gmail do
it a few times too.

It's one thing to show a banner at the top letting me know you have an app.
But I never want to be directed from Safari into an app. If I wanted to use
the app, I'd have opened the app. Since I'm in Safari, it means I want to use
the web site.

~~~
scarface74
Why have the apps installed at all? There is nothing I can do in the apps that
I can’t do on the websites. Usually the apps are worse.

~~~
mcgrath_sh
Watching ESPN in the browser is a worse experience than ESPN’s app. I have the
app on my phone for this. There are reasons to have apps on a phone. That
said, it is infuriating that when I click an ESPN link on twitter, it opens in
the ESPN app and not a web browser.

~~~
TylerE
Depends. The ESPN app is actually pretty shit. On my Smart TV it is a
juddering, frame dropping mess. I actually get better streams by opening the
ESPN site in Chrome, and casting the tab.

~~~
scarface74
All Smart TVs suck except the ones with integrated Roku.

~~~
TylerE
It’s not the TV. I stream 4k60 from YouTube quite happily.

~~~
scarface74
It’s the “smart” part that I was referring to. The Roku TV’s panels are just
average.

~~~
TylerE
It's the "smart" part responsible for decoding the incoming bytestream.

------
baal80spam
I love RSS so much. I use inoreader but there are many free RSS readers
available (like feedly). I don't subscribe to anything via any other means -
RSS completely covers my daily news needs. Please keep it alive!

------
danShumway
Curiosity question, will most modern RSS-readers be able to find an RSS link
on their own, or is it a good idea for me to include a link on a homepage that
users can copy-paste?

I've never advertised any of my rss feeds, I just leave them up at
<domain>/rss.xml. I was under the impression that RSS feed locations were
mostly standardized, but I'm noticing that the feed location for this blog is
at a different URL.

~~~
Deimorz
They should be able to find it as long as you have a <link> or <a> tag with
the correct attributes/values on them.

See this section and the one below it: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting_Started/Syndicating#Adding_the_.3Clink.3E)

------
jedberg
I stopped using RSS when Google Reader went away, but I don't really miss it.
I just use HN instead, which is like a curated list of the best stuff and I
don't have to already know it exists and be subscribed to an RSS feed.

I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS
feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.

~~~
asdff
I have a hn rss feed. I have it set where only articles >100 points are pushed
to it, otherwise it's a fire hose.

------
3xblah
Instead of just reacting to the instantly agreeable title, out of curiousity I
read the blog post and checked the blogroll the author cites as the cause for
him to comment on adding RSS support.

It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn
and mikebabb. Neither has much content.

~~~
3xblah
s/curiousity/curiosity

------
throw0101a
Are we talking about RSS _specifically_ or a syndication feed _generally_
(i.e., "RSS" proverbially)?

Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement?

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed)

~~~
detaro
People use Atom and RSS almost interchangeably. Generally, it doesn't really
matter which one of the two you support, nearly everything does both, I'd
personally tend towards Atom.

IMHO, JSON Feed is basically irrelevant: It adds little to no functionality,
development seems to have stalled after a short initial burst of enthusiasm
and as far as I know nothing supports it but not Atom.

~~~
chrismorgan
Thirteen years ago, some podcast readers coped with RSS but not Atom, but
everything else coped with both just fine. Since then, I _think_ the podcast
situation improved so that everything supports Atom; but it’s very difficult
to find any information at all about feeds after 2007: the problems were
solved, and so no one talks about it.

Atom is technically superior to RSS, most concretely in how it specifies the
format of fields like title and content, whether they’re plain text or HTML.
This means that I can use things like <em> and <code> in my blog post titles
and have it work (clients will either display the HTML unaltered, sanitise it,
or strip tags, leaving the correct text), and have blog post titles with text
like <_>::v::<_> (real example!) not get mangled horrifically.

I do not recommend that anything use RSS now.

------
velcrovan
Just the other day I wrote an RSS (well, Atom) feed generator for my site in
Racket:
[https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f](https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f)

------
bhhaskin
Yes please. We need to keep the web open and federated.

------
zenlot
I am surprised when people keep saying here that RSS is dead. I am using it
more than ever, every site (including hn news) configured by topic in
Inoreader. I even have reddit feeds within it via inline reddit. This way I
can see my read/unread counts and mark favorites. I can also quickly export my
feeds. It works cross device and it's the only source I use for news, articles
or anything else I read on web. If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I
probably never visit it again.

~~~
bhelkey
Just because you have kept using RSS doesn't mean that the community has grown
or even that it has stayed constant in size. Interest in RSS (or at least the
best proxy I could find, Google searches for "RSS") has been steadily
declining since ~2006[1].

> If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.

Assuming RSS continues to decline, I imagine that more and more sites will
stop supporting it.

[1]
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss)

Disclaimer: Googler if it matters. All opinions are my own.

~~~
zenlot
Google Trends is not an answer. It's more likely that people will soon be fed
up with enormous unrelated content and infinite scrolling, and will revert
back to what's actually useful: specialized and managable content.

And if you're searching for trends only, you'll be able to find that it's
already happening. Community discovered that social networks is not an answer,
the content is mostly garbage in there and nobody wants to 'scroll to
infinity' anymore.

Look at Lisp trends at different time periods in the past 60 or so years. And
then at Clojure or functional programming in general now.

Re: 'googler' \- no it doesn't matter. Just because you're 'googler', doesn't
mean that you're right.

Lets revise this in 10 years. My bet is: if not RSS, then better RSS ;)

------
cordite
For a small competition when I was 14, I worked on a hand rolled CMS system in
PHP, MySQL. I remember trying to determine what RSS was and Atom, what it all
meant. I thought it was cool and a handy feature I could hook into that little
RSS app I found on Kubuntu.

Didn't win the competition, but expanded it over a few years and kept using it
as my main blog until it fell aside when I went to university.

But unfortunately since the death of Google Reader, RSS hasn't found a way
back into my life.

------
JSavageReal
What do people use to read RSS feeds? I stopped following RSS feeds ever since
Google Reader shut down, and wondering what a good free replacement is.

~~~
Seirdy
The very best RSS reader in my not-so-humble opinion is the FOSS
[Newsboat]([https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/)), the spiritual
successor to Newsbeauter.

It can pipe article links and text through other programs. I can pipe YouTube
videos to youtube-dl, article text through pandoc and w3m, podcast files
through podboat (newsboat's sister podcasting program), and links through a
bookmarking program. You can also pipe article text through something like
urlview to select links by pressing a key. I can also reload each of my 200+
feeds in a different thread to speed things up.

------
kkarakk
RSS feeds are designed for an offline first usecase. Almost no one subscribes
to this usecase anymore since mobile internet is just REALLY good MOST of the
time.

When it isn't - subway rides, long commutes passing through areas with weak
signals - i just listen to podcasts instead of the frustration of reading an
article and not being able to search anything instantly.

------
darekkay
I'm using RSS feeds daily (even for HN), so it was a no-brainer to add RSS
support to my blog as well. I've also created Tip of the Day [1] - while the
daily tips can be accessed via an HTML site, I have written it mainly with RSS
in mind.

[1] [https://tips.darekkay.com/](https://tips.darekkay.com/)

------
overcast
What the heck is a good free or paid RSS reader these days? I paid for Reeder,
and a few months later they discontinued support.

~~~
favorited
If you're on a Mac, NetNewsWire just released a new version after many years.
Plus, it's open source.

~~~
Zelphyr
NetNewsWire is a wonderful piece of software. I remember it being a part of my
daily routine back in 2005ish but then it got bought and bought again and I
couldn't afford the price of it (thanks Great Recession!) so I stopped using
it. It has been graciously returned to the hands of Brent Simmons, its
original developer, who has himself graciously made it Open Source and as
fantastic as it ever was.

------
m-p-3
If your main concern is people scrapping your blog or only reading the RSS
without visiting it directly, at least put the first paragraph in the feed. I
prefer seeing the whole article, but at least having a preview let me decide
if I want to keep reading, and it let me knows something new came out.

------
Xavdidtheshadow
Totally! It makes content so easy to track. I try to use Twitter a little bit
for this, but most accounts post lots of other tweets in addition to "new
post", so I have to spend time trying to guess which hashtags they might use
to denote actual posts.

Separately, I really like JSONFeed
[https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed](https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed).
It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier
format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on
more.

------
burtonator
RSS is dead... long since dead. There are a myriad of reasons why it died.

1\. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so
they make money from ads.

2\. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS.

3\. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one
really knows about it.

Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform
which only has sunset support for RSS

[http://www.datastreamer.io/](http://www.datastreamer.io/)

~~~
scarface74
RSS is “dead” as far as users, but who cares?

Every site I frequent has an RSS feed - even Reddit. As long as content
producers support it, it’s not a problem.

~~~
bhelkey
As others have mentioned, there is a fear that if RSS users aren't viewing ads
and RSS users keep decreasing in number, eventually, content producers will
stop supporting it.

~~~
scarface74
Very few sites have the full content in the RSS feed. Some even just have the
titles. It doesn’t really effect ad views.

------
stijnsanders
I've been dabbling on an RSS feed reader of my own for a while now, which
sorts all posts by their published date. Do you know how I can get the people
over at Hacker Noon to add a <pubDate> element to their RSS feed? I'v tried
here: [https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-
pubdate/1...](https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-
pubdate/10965)

------
drinchev
Funny story. Most blogs I follow via my Reeder [0] ( actually best app I've
ever used for (i|mac)OS ... no, I'm not affiliated with the app ) are ones
that end up on HN. It's funny but my RSS feed currently is 30% HN / 30% Media
websites like The Guardian / 40% Other. Since a year or two I rarely add new
sources to my feed, which I feel it's sad.

0: [https://reederapp.com](https://reederapp.com)

------
nreece
Absolutely agree, RSS feeds help save so much time for end-users, and makes
contextual skimming much easier in one place.

* _Shameless plug_ *: Our little service, Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), helps create RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs, and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.

------
mikorym
RSS and IRC I think have that timeless quality that may mean that it will not
die out, and hopefully have perennial resurgences. Not just the irritation of
FB style notifications and dark patterns, but also speed and uniform
customisation play a role. Why let FB guess what I want to see if I _know_
which I need to see to be ha ppy/productive/nonnarcissist?

~~~
asdff
The strength of being a protocol and not a platform.

------
xtat
If you don't have RSS I won't see what you post unless it gets absurdly
popular. I'm not coming to your website. Sorry.

------
asdff
I use RSS for everything I do on the internet: news, other websites,
subreddits, craigslist, hn, even journal articles.

On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you
want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the
abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and
keep track of colleagues.

------
tschellenbach
If you want to contribute to help create a consumer-grade RSS reading
experience:
[https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds)

I think part of the problem is that there are no RSS readers that try to
appeal to a mainstream user audience. They are all tailored to power users.

------
twsted
Apple is doing really good things in Safari for privacy and for the web, but
removing support for RSS was surely not one of them.

~~~
saagarjha
Not only did they remove it from Safari, they removed RSS support from News as
well, probably to push publishers towards using the Apple News format instead
:/

------
floatboth
Please add h-feed to your site:
[http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed](http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed)

And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via
[https://granary.io/?input=html](https://granary.io/?input=html)

~~~
Grumbledour
What would be the benefit of this?

I always liked microformats, but unlike RSS, they are truly dead. There never
were many End-User Applications that utilized them. I hoped for a long time,
browser would integrate features like automatic address or event detection,
but it never materialized. And since Firefox won't even mention RSS feeds
these days, I am not sure what microformats gets us at this point.

~~~
floatboth
[https://indieweb.org/projects](https://indieweb.org/projects)

microformats + webmention == twitter-like replies across websites

------
theandrewbailey
After adding RSS support to my blog, I noticed that it was part of an easy way
to implement a backup and restore mechanism.

------
rsscircus
Looking at the blogroll he's talking aboit, I counted : 9 blogs with RSS
Autodiscovery + link pointing to the RSS feed 20 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery
only 3 blogs with link to the RSS feed 4 blogs with nothing (including it's
own blog)

RSS link+autodiscovery would be so cool on every blog!

------
crtasm
I was looking for a feed for the broadcaster Arte's website and found
[https://rssbridge.net/](https://rssbridge.net/) which has 'bridges' for a
large number of sites. Can be self-hosted too.

------
pjmlp
My lousy one never let it go. RSS is a protocol, not something that depends on
Web readers, browser extensions, native app, whatever.

Each one should use whatever they feel like, and I never understood the drama
around Google's reader.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
How do you sell an RSS feed addition to a profit-only minded manager?

How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their
customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout
them as they demand?

~~~
torstenvl
You don't sell "RSS" or any other tech speak. You sell a proven syndication
technology that effectively pushes notifications to the user that there's more
content on your server for them to come look at. And unlike Google News or
similar syndication mechanisms, _your company_ gets to choose what and how
much content to include in the blurb/hook.

------
quintonish
I made a thing that sends an email when a list on the internet changes
[https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur](https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-
lemur)

------
bbyford
RSS is literally how I get my news from the web. We should be making useage
and protocal better for the modern concerns of power consumption (bandwidth
usage), delivery and user discovery.

------
Pete-Codes
Ghost has RSS built in.

------
meerita
I stopped using Facebook and other social networks in favor of reading more
blogs and write on mine. I installed a new RSS feed and I enjoy it quite a
lot.

------
non-entity
I'm thinking of starting a blog soon, does anyone know if the popular static
site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, etc.) have trivial support for RSS?

~~~
saagarjha
Jekyll has a plug-in (jekyll-feed) for adding an Atom feed, which is what I
use for my website:
[https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml](https://saagarjha.com/feed.xml)

~~~
WorldMaker
With Jekyll you can also get a simple RSS view directly in a page template,
rather than bring in a full plugin. (Useful, for instance, on GitHub Pages
where the available plugins are restricted.)

For example: [https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-
pa...](https://github.com/WorldMaker/blog.worldmaker.net/blob/gh-
pages/feed.xml)

(Mine's additional fun because I also tried to make sure that three previous
RSS URLs remained supported in my migrations across multiple blog engines over
more than a decade and a half.)

~~~
saagarjha
jekyll-feed is whitelisted for use on GitHub Pages:
[https://pages.github.com/versions/](https://pages.github.com/versions/)

~~~
WorldMaker
Good to know.

(Looks like Jekyll-feed was added to GitHub Pages sometime in 2016, and I last
updated my RSS feed way back in 2015.)

------
swlkr
I prefer email newsletters to RSS, the content typically looks better, and it
makes economic sense.

~~~
kgwxd
It does make more sense to have them tell you they've posted something new
rather than querying every 5 minutes. I'd hate to use email for high volume
feeds, like HN, but I think it's an ok solution for low volume. However, email
isn't anonymous and spam filtering is in the hands of the host which may cause
you to miss somethings or even force the publisher to change the address it's
sent from because the old one got blacklisted so badly.

------
snazz
Is it just Jekyll or do most static site generators include an RSS link in
their default templates?

~~~
OrgNet
Hugo does too

------
amelius
Can't this be automated by a service which "diffs" websites over time?

------
robmoorman
Yes fully agree, rss is (still) a very nice way in providing structured
content.

------
palashkulsh
just like RSS should be there for latest articles, sitemaps should also be
there for collection of all articles on the blog. So that we are not at the
mercy of crawlers to get list of all articles of a blog.

------
toyg
It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest ever success-story in web-publishing,
WordPress, reached early popularity because it had first-class support oob for
two formats that declined a few years later: XHTML and RSS.

------
forrestthewoods
> Can you think of a good reason NOT to use RSS on a website? What am I
> missing here?

Because not enough readers use RSS to justify the time.

------
simplecomplex
Yeah, and please link to it so my feed reader can pick it up from the URL.

------
hootbootscoot
n-gate has your number pegged, comment thread. the summary is succinct,
brutal, and highly comical.

------
SanchoPanda
Or make your own super easy peasy RSS feed for almost any site with
lynx/w3m/curl/etc and diff.

