Here's a product idea. A service that would automatically screen-scrape any URL of a blog (using heuristics and/or machine learning to figure out the layout and where the posts are) and then outputs an RSS feed.
Absolutely RSS, my whole news consumption process depends on it, I hate polling for stuff. Thankfully, the vast majority of blogs still provide RSS, even if a bit hidden sometimes.
I even consume HN via RSS: I have separate RSS feeds for items that reach 50, 250 and 1000 points, respectively.
I use the free one but I’ve been using it for a long time so I’m grandfathered in the original free plan with unlimited sources. As of today I have ~500 feeds which I subscribe to, I think for new accounts the free limit is much lower.
I'm working on increasing subscriptions on my blog - do you frequently see the "Subscribe on Feedly" buttons, and if so do you use them? Or are they not useful?
Haha luckily most of those feeds are pretty inactive, maybe a post a month or so, which is exactly why RSS feeds are so essential, I can keep the pulse on a massive source of good content.
I don't think I'd use a "subscribe on feedly" button, typically I just copy and paste the URL into feedly and it automatically scrapes the RSS feed, if it exists. Sometimes I manually copy the RSS link directly from the website, when exposed.
Do you expect the RSS feed to contain the entire article so that you can read it all entirely within Feedly? Or does RSS only need to have a summary and then a link to the full article?
I know that some blogs put their full articles in the RSS feed, so you can just read it directly in your RSS viewer, email notification, etc. I've tried doing this too but since my blog is 100% bespoke PHP (i.e. it's not WordPress or some other big platform), it's not easy to do. When I write an article, I'm literally writing raw HTML with some included PHP functions to stick the navbar and footer on. It's not easy to get this into an RSS feed as you can imagine...
13 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] threadI even consume HN via RSS: I have separate RSS feeds for items that reach 50, 250 and 1000 points, respectively.
I'm working on increasing subscriptions on my blog - do you frequently see the "Subscribe on Feedly" buttons, and if so do you use them? Or are they not useful?
I don't think I'd use a "subscribe on feedly" button, typically I just copy and paste the URL into feedly and it automatically scrapes the RSS feed, if it exists. Sometimes I manually copy the RSS link directly from the website, when exposed.
I know that some blogs put their full articles in the RSS feed, so you can just read it directly in your RSS viewer, email notification, etc. I've tried doing this too but since my blog is 100% bespoke PHP (i.e. it's not WordPress or some other big platform), it's not easy to do. When I write an article, I'm literally writing raw HTML with some included PHP functions to stick the navbar and footer on. It's not easy to get this into an RSS feed as you can imagine...