I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging process, it's not a way that sites can keep users hooked on the site to boost ad impressions.
RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's nothing better.
Yup. RSS is exactly what it say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. And in that simplicity is a tool that just works. No wresting with authenication. No "oh shit they updated the API." None of that.
Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.
Couldn't agree more. RSS is just about content. It's up to the feed reader to provide interactions, e.g. w/plugins allowing to ping back authors/original URLs in order to create a kind social network. I don't think such a business logic would have to be implemented in RSS for it to be successful. Separation of concerns rules.
What you try to say is (I think): RSS is better because it's totally foreign to clickbait. The goals sites try to reach using clickbait are goals not helped by RSS.
Right?
RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.
He's partially right, the web 2.0 trend was all about interaction, "we" all believed it would be heavens on earth while we now know it's far from that and now I (we?) would love to go back to light and simple aggregation.
Said in a recent thread how much butthurt I still hold towards Google over the fate of Reader. Stupid shortsighted idiots at Google for deprecating Reader.
Maddening they gave it up for freaking horrible Google+.
Ultimately, I ended up with Digg Reader. Don't remember exactly how many platforms I tried, maybe a half dozen?.
Feedly was one contender, The Old Reader was another.
The primary reason I settled on Digg is that they came out with an iPhone app relatively quickly after they launched. Regrettably, their iPhone app has been broken for maybe 6 months now. Digg used an OAuth web-view embedded user agent. Google appears to no longer to support such requests from apps. Digg needs to update the app with Google's other authentication libraries.
Annnnnnd I've just opened an account with inoreader. Probably will make a jump over. Digg has annoyed me long enough. They can't find / pay a reliable IOS developer.
I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default.
Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.
I've been running a Mastodon instance and kicking around ideas for enhancements. "Let users subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds" is quickly feeling like the one that would be most useful; I really miss the days of Livejournal when I could subscribe to the updates of my friends on LJ, and have stuff from the RSS/Atom feeds of other sites mixed in between them.
In chronological order, of course.
Mastodon is built on top of OStatus and ActivityPub, which are inspired by RSS' successor Atom, but sadly I don't think either is compatible, so I'm gonna be cramming an RSS/Atom library in there. Ah well. It's not like Mastodon doesn't already have a dependency tree as long as your arm.
There seems to be a few plugins like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/, but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS.
I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.
I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the web.
And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself.
As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account aylmao@nytimes.com for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would.
And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.
Of all the products I've used over the years that no longer exist Google Reader is the only one I still constantly miss. At least once or twice a week I think about how I wish it was still around. I use Digg now, but it's just not quite the same.
Google reader was epic! Although the development when it comes to RSS readers and such went into overdrive when Google shut it down. I think The Old Reader has replaced most of Google Reader's features, but not all of them by any means.
No one has replicated Google Reader's scale definitely. Some combination of email/twitter/reddit/facebook has somewhat taken it's place, but they're not real substitutes if you were using Google Reader.
Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.
The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.
If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.
> Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers
> were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS,
> with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.
yes, but that can be helpful as well:
spiegel online (biggest german news site) has feeds for every subtopic; for an example for every sport an own feed.
i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.
I wonder how many blog sites have a large number of RSS users and don’t even know they have an RSS feed.
Most Wordpress sites have an RSS feed at ./feed, but many of the sites I follow don’t actually have an RSS link offered as an option.
It’s there, pick Customise from the menu and drag the RSS icon into the bar. But they’re not interested in actively working on it – suggested features like hiding it instead of greying it out based on feed presence are closed due to a lack of interest. I think ideally they’re want it to be an extension.
Don't they have that already? I remember it being a prominent feature for browsers ~10 years ago. Heck, even Outlook had a feed reader - still has it I think, though it's always sucked.
You could have a identifiable feed URL. Static, personalised ads that most feed readers wouldn't block.
And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.
If you use a web reader, I think you don't even need an unique url if your ads are static images. Just request an image from your server and use the user cookie for recommendations
I find it surprising that someone would say it's not easily shared, since you can just copy the entry's permalink and send it to someone. I don't think it could be any easier!
Heck, I don't think I ever use a site's sharing button. The only exceptions are probably "retweet" on Twitter and "share now" on Facebook, which reposts content on your timeline in a way that can't be replicated by posting the URL.
On Chrome for Android there's the Web Share API [0], which they claim makes it easier to share content, although I'm unconvinced it's needed or really even desirable.
RSS is a protocol, applications could implement Twitter/tumblr's retweeting functionality on top of it... FB conversations would also work.
From the end-user's perspective, I don't think anyone is asking for features that are fundamentally at odds with using RSS to distribute messages. The resulting network would be much more distributed and harder to "monetize" (imo, good for users)
I use a blend of things. For a story that's breaking right now, I go to Twitter.
For blogs and websites that consistently have things I want to read, I use RSS + Feedly (I follow around 40 feeds).
For actual news, I use Apple News.
I probably spend the least time on Twitter and the most in the Apple News app. Apple News does a remarkably good job of showing me things I want to read. I assume it's based on how long I spend reading articles because I don't use the like button a lot.
I tried Apple News for a few months. I felt like it started to filter what it was showing me based on what I was reading. One of the reasons I prefer an RSS feed is I don’t get the impression that the news source may be tailoring the news feed.
This (probably correctly) assumes that the average user stays 'dumb' forever. The 'intelligent' user would understand the benefits of rss, demand them from their news outlets and be willing to pay, if necessary, an appropriate amount of money for it.
This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.
Not necessarily. My brother, 6 years older, insists that RSS is dead, nobody uses it, and he's happy to follow the trend. He will happily chase whatever tech is fashionable to increase his perceived workforce market value. He is intelligent, but also cynical. His rationale in this and many other cases is "you shouldn't use it because people don't use it."
This is fine for most people; the "interaction" nowadays (likes, retweets, ...) doesn't really represent support but a lack of communication skill from the consumer.
When someone likes something without anything to say it's just a metric, doesn't bring value to a discussion.
This isn't true, it can be a crowd source quality control. Not as good as a direct share from one of my trusted colleague's, but it does work as a quality control given the right community makeup, the right web of users.
This is a problem I can live with! So not all solutions to the centralized, monopolized social/tracking web lie in the future. We should also learn from the past, and it's encouraging to see some tools we need are already there, ready to use!
This is an interesting point of view. I personally never understood why someone would need to "like" an update. Thus, I've never understood the appeal of things like facebook. All I need is RSS.
When I've tried RSS in the past, I've ended up with a deluge of content to sift through. That may be partially my own fault for subscribing to actively updated sites, but I would've welcomed ways to filter out posts based on the user feedback of peers. That's part of the reason sites like HN are helpful in finding interesting content.
Fair. But what if users also had they own RSS feed(s)? They'd select the items/articles they want to share and they get broadcast into (one of) those feed(s). Their friends can subscribe, and why not, comments would easily fit into such a feed as well.
Only problem I see is that these users would need a URL for the feed for their friends to subscribe to.
So you'd need an external service (like Google Reader was). How about one of these new(ish) open/decentralized social network thingies? I forget their names, there was one that was sort-of-twitter and another sort-of-facebook. They probably already have RSS built-in with various RSS API endpoints for different filters on the stream. Maybe such an idea could ride along with that?
Also, I want to echo the other comments, how it is nice that RSS just does one thing. Just means it's a building block.
Welllllllll back in the day Google Reader did have a social element. You could share articles / feeds with friends.
I think The Old Reader tried to keep some of that social element but I do know how successful they were. Due to reasons that I now can’t recall, I preferred Digg Reader over TOReader. Even Digg, for whatever reason has tried to make their RSS offering more social with their Digg platform. I avoid social as much as humanly possible so again not sure how effective they are.
My experience with RSS predates Google Reader by a couple of years, i think i started using it around 2003, ish? I didn't start using Google Reader until (IIRC) 2009 so my interest in the social element was absolutely zero. RSS was designed to be a consumption means only, which is my point. I'm fine with aggregators adding a social element, as it's not the aim and can easily ignored (Feedly even has this i think). I'm even fine with sources having only the title and the first paragraph as i can choose to ignore the content if it doesn't interest me.
My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail
to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it.
[1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.
What limitations are those? HTML is great for what it's supposed to do (allow anyone to publish and distribute content online). RSS/Atom is great for what it does too.
RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.
> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.
Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.
For any content that's being sold as such (eg, news sites) that's definitely copyright infringement. For user-generated content, I'm not sure. Though I would not be even a little bit surprised if Facebook asserted copyright to anything put into it. In either case, probably violates the TOS as well.
Technically it's achievable, but it would likely be forever relegated to mostly-illegal backwaters.
Yes, it's illegal. But if we don't at least acknowledge that we're in a fight, then we're losing the battle for sure. By the way, Uber and AirBnB also did many illegal things, and so did Google (see e.g. Google Books).
I think the problem is that scraping everything except waywalled info may be legal (in Europe, at least) as long as it's for personal use, but may get you/me/whoever in trouble if we start redistributing that content in RSS feeds. Then again, most of the resources won't even bother if you scrape them into RSS unless they make money of ads (haha, find a resource that doesn't) or overload their servers. But IFTTT model might be a nice workaround where users actively need to use some community recipe to scrape and they assume responsibility.
a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head.
if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.
I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support it, e.g. Twitter.
Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now's the time.
I actually read everything by RSS except HN, since the posts here often get better over time, thanks to comments, so they're less suitable for RSS, in my opinion.
By the way, if you follow YouTube channels, not only do they still provide RSS feeds, as you can get a nice OPML file of all the channels you subscribe to: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager (scroll to the bottom)
I use RSS for following YouTube channels, but the only problem I have is that I have to click on each video, I'd like a RSS client to create a custom playlist, at least for all the music videos.
I used to use YouTube's email notifications, but they would skip some videos randomly, and I'd be left wondering what videos I missed.
Content creators can choose to disable notifications on specific videos.
Creators sometimes do this if they publish more videos than usual, or of the video is different from their normal content.
Also when you subscribe you now also have to click the bell next to the subscribe button to get all notifications.
YouTube itself also has a built in subscription feed that lists all videos published by channels you subscribe to. It also lists the channels with an icon next to each if they have unwatched video.
I use Feedly for this exact thing! YouTube's recommendations were either distracting or just not relevant. Feedly embeds the video right in the reader so no going to YouTube even. And now I only get the videos I want to watch.
Exactly, a "Make playlist" button on either a folder of YouTube channels, or on just a channel, that would make a custom playlist of all unviewed videos.
Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/
Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?
I self-hosted for a long time but I eventually switched to fastmail mostly because, no matter how much I tweaked, I couldn’t get the spam down to a tolerable level and I got sick of tweaking the weighting on the various filters in spamassassin.
I stopped using RSS circa 2010 since RSS produces just too much content (well at least my reader did, as it was not archiving stuff until read, just like an email inbox). I was reading my RSS feeds almost as a full-time job and the unread count was only going up and up :)
TBH, it's a bit like this now for me with HN and Twitter even without RSS. "This looks interesting... (click)(open in new tab)". One week later: 300 tabs open.
So what if the unread counts go up? I have a feed with 543 unread items, and many others with 100+. Sometimes I scan the titles of the latest dozens of items, then mark all as read.
For me, that's the advantage of RSS over Twitter: your unread counts are separate for each feed, so that blog that rarely updates but is always worthwhile to read doesn't get lost in the pile of cheap content.
Lol and I have a feed with 3000 unread items, actually several. I don't pay attention to unread counts. Well actually I do, they're there for reference, but that's it. I do the same thing, I might open 50-100 interesting-looking links and then mark the rest as read.
I find the key to RSS is that you need to subscribe to actual content, rather than just a feed. A lot of the stuff on the internet is, frankly, just a barely curated feed of information pushed out a firehose. Unless you feel like you need to, don't subscribe to feeds from news organizations unless you're willing to skim and blast away lots of unread stuff. Most of that you simply won't read.
With RSS, I like subscribing to journals and organizations that publish substantial content (lots of text rather than ads) at steady but not explosive rates. RSS is pure consumption, so if you're using it to "follow a feed" I think you're doing it wrong. Though YMMV, of course.
I've gotten into the habit of organizing my feeds into two groups. People who post infrequently with high quality articles get put into one group. Sites that generate loads of articles (NPR, Guardian, HN) go into the other.
I generally read everything in group one. In group two, I start the day by just marking the entire group read. If something neat comes into group two during the day I might read it when I have a spare moment. Otherwise, it gets flushed.
I am constantly producing tabs on my laptop, and every now and then saving the session somewhere so I can get some fresh air after ~200 open tabs. But the real problem is on Android, where chrome must have +1000 tabs by now (the last time I counted they were +700)
We really have to find a way from this enormous amount of content.
For me the hassle of checking different things in different place made it so that I would only check "a few" places.
With RSS I'm crawling under a huge load of articles that I always have to clear up. I used to be extremely addicted to that, I used it to get through work stuff now and when I have weeks of articles pilling up in my feed I feel bad.
I use it, and definitely love that, but it def. re-enforce addiction, not the contrary.
For me it cured the addiction. On my view I could see if there are relevant news and if not get done very fast as to compared to visiting each site on my own. Then the occasional backlog made me realize that most isn't even relevant. That lead to a more healthy relationship with news.
Easiest way to find the RSS feed on most sites is to search for "RSS" in the page source; there's usually just one instance, and it's a direct link.
These days, many sites don't advertise their feeds, but it's still in the source (and is often broken in one way or another). If it is botched, a friendly email to their web admin with a link to the W3C Feed Validator [1] can go a long way; most times it's an easy fix for them.
That works for the main firehose feed and https://news.ycombinator.com/showrss, but there isn't a feed for the ask posts as of yet that I've seen anyway.
There's no difference in the consumption method though, is there? I kind of lump Atom and RSS together in my mind. Some of my subscribed feeds use one, some use the other, but without looking at the URL, I couldn't tell.
There is no practical difference at all. RSS has more mindshare outside the google universe, but all reader read both, the formats can be mapped from the one to the other, and all languages have libraries to create both. And also manually they are both equally easy to write.
I for one opted to solely generate RSS wherever possible. Having two equally suited standards is a waste.
But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline. When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore updated articles.
For the obvious reason (cough timely standardization cough) Atom is technically and often practically superior to the RSS family of formats (somehow not distinguished to each other). And after more than 10 years of usage, I'm pretty sure that every feed reader in the continued existence now has Atom support.
No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds right now :)
I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of format support libraries? https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date string to my chosen languages date object.
You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The blog engine I use has different options to handle that, I for one think just pushing a new entry with a new guid is the right solution; but then of course rss readers can't mark updates.
My point about date string is that, if people really honored the "specification" from the first place, why the `datetimes` directory has eight different files :-) I have personally seen lots of websites with Korean date & time format ("YYYY년 mm월 dd일 hh시 mm분 ss초", see `korean.py` there) and I'm not sure if they are now gone. (And yes I did have my own aggregation engine back then---it was at least born after feedparser though.)
Yes, but the self URL in atom feeds is tedious. It is the primary reason a static site generator requires a configuration to specify the domain where it will end up. RSS feeds can be copied to any domain and still pass validation.
A friend and I made a tool/framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites that don't offer one. It's written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of code.
The sites seems somehow immature to me. The "Shared Pipes" sections lists a few examples, but the first one returns an empty feed and the second one returns "Internal Server Error".
It is probably because of the definition of the pipes being outdated, but it needs better presentation.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. The first pipe is filtering for crypto currency articles on HN, right now there seems to be none with those exact keywords, I'll add some more. The second is user-provided and probably dies because of the sub-pipe, I removed my upvote - now the second one is https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx, which works fine.
In general I tried to keep backwards compatiblity as much as possible, I'm only aware of one single breaking change (filter via regexpression, which was not possible for long before the syntax changed and should not have affected many pipes).
I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me.
Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say 2 hours ago. I switch to "Most Recent" and guess what, I can't find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person's page).
I'm getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.
I love Google Reader as well, but switched quite seamlessly to Feedly. What's your problem with Feedly? I assume it's something about the aesthetic design of it, because it's very much the same as Google Reader.
Did they change things? Because when the great reader explosion happened after Google Reader died I evaluated tons of readers and decided on a newsblur.com subscription in the end. I remember Feedly catering to the "images are great"-Pinterest crowd.
Yeah. I suggest giving them another try. I actually thought they were the most popular RSS reader these days. It's very customizable (even for the free tier).
It looks better than then, true. But it's still trying to be so flashy. And I feel like they are trying to push all their useless social features on me. And there's a lack of customizability. I guess the free tier is better than what newsblur offers, but for me, newsblur is where I'm staying.
Exactly. I'm extremely happy to pay $20/yr for BazQux . Like Pinboard, it's simple, does one thing well, and just _works_. I'm amazed that it doesn't seem to have gotten more mindshare as a replacement for Google Reader.
Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.
Just looked and there's an add content option in the bottom left corner that if you click on that and select Publications and Blogs gives you an option to add a URL.
I've not really seen any sponsored content other than the occasional banner message up the top which is easily dismissed.
edit: I have by default feedly set to my "all" feed and in that respect it works much like google reader used to.
I’m using the Feedly iOS app. I went to “Add content”, and it opened a sidebar with a searchbox which supposedly lets you “search” for content by “title, URL or #topic”.
I’ve entered the URL of the archive.org feed ( http://archive.org/services/collection-rss.php ) and it says:
“No sources found. If you are looking for a specific site, please enter the full URL.”
I've been using Feedly ever since Google Reader went away. It's easy to add my own sources. I don't know anything about force-fed news sources; I've never seen anything like that.
No, it is actually a RSS reader. It just tries to solve the information overload problem by curating the news sources for you. If you have a small number of sources you still can get to all of the information. In order to add a feed, just paste in the rss link and its in your reader.
I use Reeder on my iPad and add RSS feeds individually to the app. There is a section where I can add a Feedly account to the app. Does that provide any advantages over directly adding the RSS feeds?
After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals.
Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just have to press 'o' to open the article in my browser.
I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves “stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine)
I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome and didn’t always work.
I don't mind the stubs, since they usually give me enough to know whether or not I want to read the whole article. For most sites that serve stubs, I only want to read a handful of what they publish.
I have not had time to figure out how this works, but in inoreader mobile app, you can pull down in the article stubs and quite often you get the full article downloaded directly in the app. Weirdest is that this seems to work even beyond some paywalls.
tt-rss has a plug-in that lets you specify which part of the linked article is the actual content and then, when it pulls the feed, it replaces the feed content with the text of the specified element.
Personally, I just avoid such feeds. I’ve never found this problem with any high quality blogs I follow. The sites I’ve experienced this problem with most are old media companies, and they produce so much content, it’s probably best consumed via other means. It’s a shame more paywall sites don’t make their protected content available via authenticated feeds.
Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you're subscribing to.
It is a pain - I've found 3 formats for users, channels and playlists:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<user name from url>
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<id from url>
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id from url>
Sorry for the repeated post, but if you have an account, you can subscribe to the channel and then get an OPML file with all the feeds from the Subscriptions Manager page.
I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a set of users/devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have, supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn't have to write any clients for looking things up.
This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a commercial product a few years ago.
I use Thunderbird for my email + RSS together. Somehow the three things that lots of people keep on thinking are dead or dying work perfectly together.
I find that I read my RSS feed about as often as I check my personal email, so having the two side-by-side works quite well. I also like the separation of not having it in the browser so that I'm not tempted to read it in the middle of working.
Ah yes, twitter lists. It seems they came up with those to undercut the major reason people used the likes of Tweetdeck. Only to later buy up, and shut down the desktop version of, the very same client.
And now it languishes in some side area of the service, seemingly forgotten.
I have used RSS/Atom feeds for ever, recently I have decided to ditch Twitter's client and for Twitter feeds consumption I am using twitrss.me to parse twitter user feeds. I need to find a good parse for FB and than I will be a happy man.
Yes, it's an experiment I'm running in advertising-alternative monetisation. Importantly, all mining is consensual -- the miner will only run if you open the accordion and hit Play. Not sure if I made that clear enough in the blurb itself, but it's outlined in the linked post:
I know these things have gotten a bad rap from various shenanigans with Showtime and TPB, but on my site mining is only done with user knowledge and permission.
I was quite excited when I heard of https://jsonfeed.org/. I was surprised at how much more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more.
So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its status?
XML is not a transport encoding like JSON. It is a hypermedia format that supports metadata. Even something as simple as an author attribute on a quote requires a standard on top of JSON.
“I can’t parse without programming” is a terrible reason to prefer JSON.
I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative. Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit wasteful. What I'd like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification tells the RSS reader to grab the new content.
Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it's the main distribution solution for podcasts.
The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time. It's just like an email client but just for newsletters.
Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I'm now using Apple Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing.
Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air.
Newsblur (a web-based RSS reader) added a newsletter feature a while back that's pretty useful if you want to mix RSS & newsletters in the same place. Set up an email rule to automatically forward your newsletters to a custom address and Newsblur will show them as if they're another site you've subscribed to via RSS.
I'm not a big fan of newsletters myself, but it's nice to be able to include those few sites that only offer newsletters in my regular news reading workflow.
It's interesting, because that has really nothing to do with email or RSS as protocols, it's purely a social convention that daily/weekly aggregations get sent as newsletters rather than published as RSS feeds.
As a counterexample, I follow Leah Neukirchen's Trivium, which is a feed that publishes a weekly post with a bunch of interesting links (mostly tech related). http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro
And of course, there are tools to display emails inboxes as RSS feeds.
RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed.
Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user.
Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it.
This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know of anything like it.
Feedbin.com has been wonderful for me since the demise of google reader, and frankly it's far better. It's not free, but it's very cheap and as far as I'm concerned that's a feature -- means it's less likely to just disappear or shut down one day, and AFAIK all the source code is open source.
"Feedbro" PlugIn in Firefox. For me, the browser is the natural environment for RSS reading. "Sage" did a perfect job for me in the past, but since it is not available for FF 57 yet, I switched to "Feedbro" and never regretted.
Thanks for that, it might just get me back to reading my RSS feed. Using RSSOwl isn't so great if you never open it, so the content just languishes. The browser is pretty much the natural place for RSS readers (thanks, Opera!).
Now if I could only get Feedbro to sync my read items...
It probably depends on the client you use.
Personally, I still prefer Thunderbird as I already use its email function (duh) and calendar. RSS in Thunderbird is by no means spectacular but they offer a couple of useful functions like automatically applied filters to delete, move or mark messages.
The downside, when compared to an online service, is that you obviously can only access your feed on your laptop. On the other hand, it's freeing that you don't always have to check your feeds. Also, you don't depend on a service provider to keep its product alive.
I still cannot see how https://www.inoreader.com/ doesn't get more love. I easily moved to it from Google Reader, and spend my day in the web browser version, and night with the App on my phone.
I use rss2email with cron to send posts of my family's blog by email to people for whom straight RSS is not convenient.
This is especially nice for my grandmother, who has an iPad. I found no RSS reader there that is easy to use enough, free and ad-free.
I just wanted something I can just give a RSS link to and it fetches this link and shows content. And nothing else. This does not seem to exist.
My grandmother knows how to read and write emails. Blog posts are rendered properly using rss2email in her mailbox. And she knows how to click in the email to go to the blog and comments at times.
This is actually even simpler and more optimal than a dedicated RSS App. One unique easy way to get news from the family using the tablet.
And the blog is easier than Facebook (I guess - never used it). There is just our content in the pages and that’s it. No irrelevant stuff around and no notifications.
If you are looking for ways to keep in touch with a group of people in which somebody is not really into computers, this may be one nice solution.
+1 for "nothing better". I have been using RSS for years and select my sources of information depending on its availability.
Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds.
I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows this instead.
I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads and removes any "non-content-related" stuff. I also convinced some of them to share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of "clean, ad-free" content beats anything else.
Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions, notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall...
In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can do that, you have your own RSS reader.
Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand how to convert the 'link' in the RSS feed to a 'mobile link'.
I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal.
While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a 'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence summary.
This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way it's delivered these days. It's fine (if a little irritating) if you are online all the time, but offline it's practically unusable bar the few sites that offer full length articles
I also use NewsBlur as my RSS reader of choice. It's great!
Truncated articles are a big problem with RSS I think. Sites are trying to get you to jump to their page so you can consume their advertisements. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect as I stop consuming the site's news and rarely click the links to the page. The small blurb for the feed doesn't give me enough information to want to jump to the page. Often, inline photos won't show up either, so I am less likely to find the article worth a visit to the page.
Maybe what shows up in Newsblur is a "little" irritating. But trying to get the same quality of stuff from FB is just plain irritating, without qualifications.
Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was json.
XML is not just a transport encoding like JSON. Apples to oranges. They are not comparable. It’s like comparing HTML or CSS with JSON. What’s he equivalent of XPath in JSON? There isn’t! They aren’t remotely solutions to the same thing.
So what if XML is gross? Feed generators generate it. Feed readers consume it. Computer machine language is gross too. But only some of us need to look at it, while we can all use it.
Absolutely, there's nothing better! Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation & monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche industries.
I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com, that helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage.
The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?
I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant.
There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user and others are not.
I sort my subscriptions by the amount of new posts in a descending order. I then go through the biggest offenders individually and simply unsubscribe from those that abuse my RSS feed. I read RSS once a week and sometimes once a month (I am in academia, and "Deep Work" from Cal Newport had quite an impact on me). For example, Monzo bank's blog had 31 new entries when I checked it today and OKFN labs had just 4. I opened Monzo's feed and its signal-to-noise ratio was too low and I unsubscribed from it: c'est la vie. I think you can do this only when you take a look back at a week/month worth of material as opposed to running the hamster wheel of the twitter feed.
RSS is the best to follow up with the latest news or blogs you like, yet it has some weaknesses like -I know this is the content provider's fault- not serving the full articles.
That's why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves the truncated RSS articles problem.
RSS, like Facebook, Twitter, email, and every other way to post to people, has its own uses in it's own situations that fit best for people in those situations. I dislike people trying to say we should universally move over to one format, and prefer the formats remain and be improved for people who can best use those formats.
I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single news from each site.
Don't know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.
I've been using Sage on Firefox for the last decade. Its absolutely barebones but does the job for me. However with Firefox 57 Quantum its likely it wont be supported, so I looked at Feedly, but it was a bit too Hollywood for me. Any suggestions for something simple and clean like Sage?
You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option. You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails and so the $$$ comes first before anything else
When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them. Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years, nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.
Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service before giving up on RSS entirely
[1] https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif - weird entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it impossible to skim read the titles
Try looking in Settings - Look And Feel - Transitions. It looks like you're set in Scroll, which I admit looks & feels really weird. I find Stack to be better.
I'm surprised that Feedly doesn't implement a standard scroll like Twitter etc, at least as an option.
Why do you act in such a victimized way ? You were trapped in a closed system, the trap crumbled down and now you're free.
Google did not kill RSS, it killed its RSS reader and that's it. The number of websites providing an RSS feed has not declined since.
I mean I really do not understand your way of thinking ? When Google is no more, will it have killed maps and videos ?
I was kinda worried about RSS "dying" due to google. Before google reader died I had about 140 feeds in my newsblur, right now in my newsblur tab I have 134. I'm not thinking google reader dying impacted the RSS ecosystem very much although there was a very small measurable effect.
I wonder if "Rankings" from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back incentive to produce quality Content.
I'm not using its RSS, but I have a script running on my server every five minutes that sends a new push notification on my phone every time a HN story reaches 500 points.
Funny, for me 500 points would be a flag that the story is not technical enough, and probably about how the latest iPhone's UI sucks, gender inequality in SV, Google/FB/Hw manufacturer spying on our life, and many other similar topics that inevitably end up in a lot of bikeshedding
To clarify, HN was only meant as an example. Newspapers have kind of a ranking too. A ranking could be derived from how long and in what spot it is positioned.
I was using google reader with greader app on android and after google killed it, greader switched to feedly. I imported all the feeds to feedly and continued using it with greader as if nothing happened.
On other note, Feedly app is not good. An alternative for ios is reeder app
I love RSS/ATOM. The only problem i have is with sites, that don't let me see the complete content inside feedly and i have to open the site in an extra new tab.
Would love some suggestions for this. (other feedgraber, self hosted,...)
Feedbro has built-in Readability style engine that can transform partial feeds to full feeds (you have to set it in Properties for each feed): https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
I subscribe to "Hacker Noon" RSS feed, it sometimes throws up some interesting posts, but I swear most days 90% of them seem to be about bitcoin or other cryptocurrency.
Is there any content curation on hackernoon at all?
Couldn't agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred the discreet version built into the OSX browser.
I don't really understand your question but if you were asking about how we actually store articles and provide such a feed, I can explain how I did it.
I made a markdown-based blog with the articles stored in a PgSQL database and, for now, two interfaces: the website, which I kept as lightweight as possible (no external content, no wasted space for ads etc) and a RSS feed, only experimental for now, which gives the latest articles without content (title, subtitle, dates and that's pretty much it), but I plan to give full article as a markdown article, but that'll need a bit of research (for images and such). Haven't made any way to change the query for latest articles but I'll add pagination the same way my list does it.
Okay, my question was ambiguous. I meant: how do users store and organize full articles from RSS feeds ? I used a RSS reader before a hard drive crash, and I made the mistake of subscribing to too many feeds. Aside from cutting unnecessary information overload, how do people organize their "old newspapers" ?
Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking nonsense...
There could be something better if someone wrote a completely new format with very strict requirements. Try implementing a RSS reader that can reliably keep track of which items/articles are new, which are old but changed, which are unchanged, etc.
There is enough wiggle room in both RSS and Atom specifications to make you go crazy with all the crappy half-baked feed generators out there, which unfortunately still do not run afoul of the specs, despite pulling all kinds of inconsistent crap.
I don't care if it's json, xml or something completely different, as long as the specs are tight and strict.
I don't understand where this "RSS is dead" mantra came from. RSS does what it is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet.
E.g. I don't have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels. Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to follow couple of pages I'm interested in: http://feed.exileed.com (supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other) or https://twitrss.me (Twitter only). I don't have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I'm not even talking about any news site.
With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page into RSS feed.
Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better.
(I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is that their free plan is quite limited.)
RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's nothing better.
[1] https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/