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.
Yeah I saw the link there but unfortunately that is not very helpful as if he isn't doing that on every single article you'll have a hard time finding it.
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.
Without that manually added link in the one article, there's no way to locate his feed. His blog could have been one of the ones he's complaining about.
Luckily some readers also include a "always fetch full content" feature that pulls the linked page and runs it through a "reader mode" to remove the garbage. These kind of feeds really annoy me.
A bit of that is that RSS simply doesn't have great character support. You have to escape a whole bunch of stuff that is useful to have in the final product - because for most users the RSS is a notification feed, not the endpoint they go to.
> 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.
One of my favorite webcomics updated very sporadically and didn't provide a RSS feed for the longest time; it was difficult to keep up with updates. The current feed is just a link to the comic and is a significant improvement.
The author was resistant to RSS for the longest time because they thought they _had_ to include the comic in the feed and was worried about losing ad revenue.
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:
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.
If you want to go the extra mile... For blogs that are open source, as many GitHub Pages are, you could even submit a pull request to add the RSS feed! Or write up a blog post of how to add an RSS feed to Jekyll site and submit a ticket w/ the link to your post.
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?
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. 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.
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.
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.
Medium has RSS feeds for pretty much everything, from users to tags to publications, to tags in a publications, to stories clapped on by a given user....
yes, that's what I said. For the longest time they only had comments though and not the posts themselves (or at least, they didn't advertise it if they already did). Now they have it but they don't have a proper meta tag and they don't link to it anywhere that I can find.
For instance, it took me a while to find the feed of the site in the site linked. It's in the post, but if you go to the home page it is tricky to find.
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.
I use an external feed reader, inoreader (and am thinking about using Gnome Feeds or whatever its called when it's a little less buggy), so it's useful for that anyways. I can just paste the home page in instead of digging around for a feed link in footers and what not. But I take your point, Firefox removing support really hurt me at the time too.
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.
Usually they are able to find it, I never had the problem that it couldn't be found if there was a feed URL in the source code. (Using the selfhosted version of Miniflux). It's too bad that browsers removed the RSS icon in the URL bar.
An RSS link on homepage AND a RSS Autodiscovery link in the source code is for me the best solution. RSS Autodiscovery make it discoverable by any RSS reader
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].
> 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.
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.
And many times have I thought that Pocket should also be in an extension and wondered why Mozilla is taking on the first party responsibility for it - maybe they get some partnership money?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The relevance is that at browser scale, it's the browser that drives adoption, not the other way around. Removing RSS support from the browser makes people use it less. Mozilla understands this, otherwise they wouldn't promote Pocket to browser core.
I’m personally not upset just worried about the fact that security is now a huge risk because you’re having to trust an extension creator that has access to your entire browser history or worse and who is one auto-update from turning to spy or malware.
You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure.
IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.
Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one.
Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems.
The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.
Further the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensions
And finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement.
> Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.
Waterfox preserves Live Bookmarks, doesn't do telemetry, was unaffected by expired certificate killing all addons (my FF mobile was affected so I basically had no mobile browser for a few days), among other reasons.
I know after a while I will be forced back to Chromified Firefox when development of Waterfox comes to an end, but at least for now, I can stretch out the moment of a non-Googly browser + Live Bookmarks a few more months or years like whats-her-name in Doctor Strange.
But did technie users employ live bookmarks? I love RSS, but I prefer to use readers that keep track of what I've read, mix more than one feed into the same chronological list, and have better presentation than a freaking drop-down menu.
I've used them continuously since 2005. The dropdown menu is just fine to answer the question 'has Twin Dragons webcomic added another post yet'? or 'whats new in the liliputing.com world'? without any context swaps to -> open a new program on desktop or phone and scroll through a (granted, owned by you, not FB) newsfeed for an hour.
I have heard it said that normal people don't use RSS but many power users still do.
I'm now on Netnewswire 5: https://nnw.ranchero.com/ and write a blog: http://jakeseliger.com that includes a lot of link posts. I still use RSS for all the original reasons, even if most of my friends look puzzled by the acronym "RSS." RSS still solves the "too many sites, too little time" problem extremely well, especially for occasionally updated blogs.
Heck, I only read your blog through RSS. Presumably at some point in the past I saw it, thought it was nifty, and added the feed. Haven't visited since.
The biggest problem with this model is a lot of RSS feeds only return the latest 5 or so items. So if you haven't opened your RSS reader in some time you might miss the other 10 items they published since you were last on. Google Reader was awesome because it solved this problem, but like all great things from Google it came with an expiration date.
There are some useful replacements to that Google Reader shaped hole in your heart. I'm a happy user of Newsblur, but I've heard nothing but good things for the others in the space like The Old Reader and Feedly.
I'm building a service that uses RSS. My solution to the problem is just to store every unique item in my database so I'll have a contiguous stream of articles.
A Feed reader "requires" a server component, it's true that client-side only feed readers are very limited, unless you never leave you computer offline.
I'm a happy user of Miniflux (hosted myself), but there are many alternatives.
https://miniflux.app/
I use Brief, a Firefox extension. It downloads items in the background while Firefox is open, which seems to be often enough that I don't miss anything.
Most sites will show a custom box first, and only if you agree to that box, will they ask the browser to enable notifications. They do it so that they can ask you again if you deny, because responding “deny” to the real browser prompt blocks any future attempts.
> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry
More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.
If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.
Most successful companies do both. Listening to your users is of course important, but it can't be a wholesale replacement for data driven aggregate behavior analysis because people have their own biases can forget things (and sometimes lie) and individual feedback can't be easily generalized to your entire population of users past a certain scale.
The main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you pull down RSS on your own schedule.
Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time.
However, I think push is way overused. Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Online chats, maybe some of them. CNN publishing "breaking news" that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks.
I'd much rather have the latter class of "notifications" batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption.
RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with "harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing" as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically.
They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. Publishers have wanted this since the dawn of personal computing, because their ultimate dream is to push advertising into your eyeballs without your explicit grant of permission.
Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them. (Truth be told it has never been a priority, they have always focused on "empowering developers," which really means empowering the publishers that those developers work for.) With phones and garbage like the ads in the Windows 10 Start menu, they finally achieved their dream and we're living in their dystopia today.
You know what they call advertising where the user decides when they receive it? QVC and junk mail. We have a century of advertising practice that is based on interruptions, and giving people control over the (commercial) information they receive is anathema to the entire industry.
> Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them.
Safari has a preference for "allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications" (you can also set it on a per-site basis.) iOS is scrupulous about requiring permission for notifications and allows you to configure their annoyingness (plus current iOS asks you if you still want notifications for particularly busy senders.)
> Truth be told it has never been a priority
I mean, it seems to be a priority for Apple in Safari and iOS.
I'd agree that Apple is the best of the pack right now and Mozilla is also making some improvements.
I think the web platform has a long way to go however -- considering what a low quality experience surfing the web can often be these days, it may already be too far gone.
Just a heads up, it's great to have an RSS feed, but readers won't automatically detect that you have one. I see you already have a link to your RSS feed so if you put this
That then tells all RSS readers that the link is a feed, and the reader will then detect this. Then say if I use Feedly and want to subscribe to your site, I can link to your homepage and it will automatically detect your feed.
You can also use a meta tag instead if you'd prefer not to display a link. More information can be found over MDN[0] and I also created a blog post on the 5 most important things all blogs should do.[1]
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!
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.
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.
RSS is rarely shown to end-users any more, but I know a lot of people who use tools like ITTT to push their RSS feed to Twitter automatically, and services like iTunes use RSS to import podcasts into their walled gardens. RSS is not dead; it's just become invisible infrastructure.
I think you are currently right, but that's probably ending soon as Apple looks to fund their own exclusive podcasts too [1]. I hope podcasters and their cooperatives/companies can resist the siren call.
I would be okay with that if Apple introduced a standard in the RSS feed that allowed subscription, paid for podcasts that worked across apps. I’m all for a business model that lets me give companies money and they give me stuff as opposed to advertising.
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?
At least the Vienna RSS reader (open-source for Mac), which I use, carries a full-fledged browser, and I think it displays full HTML—images and such. I'm not sure if I see any entries that execute serious Javascript, but I imagine it would work.
RSS switched from life-support to being alive when Reader died. Before there were a few apps and sites. With Reader’s death we got a resurgence and many new tools.
And even if the RSS feeds are not used a lot by the majority of the audience, I wouldn't be surprised if it helped bring in other audiences. I feel like RSS users are more likely power users and may be more a bit more interested in the site than most users.
I personally know that a lot of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to I also end up sharing articles with friends. I see these articles early and quick and help create early discussion about them and comment early on them often first. I feel like overall RSS feed users may not directly look hugely beneficial to a site, but can have other impacts hard to track.
Tell that to Stitcher. They have paid Stitcher Premium podcasts that you can only play in their (terrible) app. A third party developer ended up creating "Unofficial RSS Feeds" for them, but who knows how long that will last.
True, it is sad. What I don't understand is why Google didn't continue to push for RSS like they used to in ye olden times with Reader.
High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.
If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.
In ye olden times, there wasn't Medium. Sites where everybody could write whatever they wanted. And so sites like Medium could run their own feed of sorts, and send me a digest email with what they think I want to read.
The King(s) of Google do have a strong blogging community in Blogger, but it was never supposed to be, nor never will be, a backstop against Facebook. It would be better for Google to work within Facebook on this, as bloggers in WordPRess, or MEdium, or whatever announce on social media, guess whose ads are running on the blogs? And I myself as a dev, I'm still searching for the best articles for development practices and more. They don't see that need for us to subscribe to RSS. It's the King(s) of Facebook, Twitter, etc., that need to listen. Giving us a way to watch our subscribed RSS feeds in their own ecosystem will give them the edge on content aggregation.
Back in the days there were several blog-search engines like Technorati which would use the RSS feeds from blogs to get updates quicker than Google did, because they indexed every 15 minutes and Google every couple of days.
I’m not aware of any news site or blog that doesn’t still support RSS.
As far as difficulty in monetizing, John Gruber has been making quite a bit of money for years selling one RSS entry at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week.
I subscribe to a bunch of webcomics via RSS, and a few have changed over the years from embedding the comic into the feed to just having the feed be a link to the comic page so that they can still get some ad impressions.
I also subscribe to email newsletters that have sponsored links/blurbs in their content, and I'm sure that one could monetize RSS content similarly.
I don't know where exactly xkcd lands on the web comic popularity scale, but let's be conservative and say Top 3. The xkcd RSS feed embeds the image (and alt text) into posts. That is very clearly a deliberate decision. The comics themselves are also CC-licensed.
I feel like Randall Munroe is doing well for himself. The math is probably different for smaller players.
I agree definitely mostly dead and slowly dying off in exponential decay. Used to like my summaries but over time sites dropped it or only updated once in a blue moon. Mostly moved on to just bookmarking my favorite sites and making due.
Social networks did not decide to capture users. Users have decided that social networks are what they prefer and then the site publishers optimised for where most people are.
The social networks weren't the ones who made RSS die off. The base of publishers and users just wasn't there. That said, RSS is not dead, just not as visible as it used to be.
That's a weird feeling, reading about how RSS is dead via RSS reader. Initially I wanted to stop checking HN every 20 minutes, and solution was that simple
https://hnrss.org/newest?comments=200&count=100
> 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.
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").
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
I think other people in this thread are running services that do a similar thing.
My crisis of conscience was around storing the full text of the articles on my own server and then presenting them as a new feed on my domain, e.g. https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml
Everything in the feed is that gets generated is exactly the same as the original feed (canonical link to the actual article, publsh date, author etc) the only difference was the text in the body of each entry.
It's likely that unless you can claim status as a library or some other exception to copyright protections, as a commercial entity providing that service without compensating publishers, such a straightforward violation would get a bunch of takedown requests and eventual lawsuits for failure to respond to those requests, along with more suits if publishers have no easy way of opting out.
As a personal tool you built for yourself and your friend(s) nerdy enough to understand it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as no search engines index your site and no one finds out about it.
Posted this in another reply, it's a project I've worked on for a while, works essentially the way djhworld describes: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
Sorry, I do this (provide only truncated text) in my RSS feed because I couldn't figure out a way of keeping the special formatting my site is designed around.
Its a cop out that I still feel bad about. Maybe I will fix it sometime.
If it makes you feel better, you can run your extractor against sheep.horse as much as you want.
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.
I realize that there are some ways that people serve ads where they vet them and make sure they're not tracking readers. But even if it was easy to set something like that up, I wouldn't feel good running sponsored content or ads on my platforms -- it's not the relationship I want to have with my readers.
I take a much more negative view of ads than most other people I know. I don't just dislike ads that track users or that are poorly vetted. I dislike the psychological effect that ads have on people, I dislike the attention that they take, and I am very cautious of monetization schemes that are too closely integrated into the consumption of content. I can't think of a way I could run ads that wouldn't make reading my blog a worse experience.
I know that's a somewhat extreme position to take. But it's not that advertising is inherently evil, it's just that it has more consequences and costs than most people realize. It's not only about privacy, security, or money.
Given how large the current advertising industry is, where possible I try to block it and harm it indiscriminately. I encourage people to block ads even on websites that they would otherwise support. I think it would be good for society if the advertising industry got a lot smaller, even if that makes funding online content harder.
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!
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.
Definitely understand the hand crafting etc has value if your post is complex and has interactive elements or lots of graphic design, and would be a shame to go to waste.
I guess the main thing you need to provide really is the text and images, <p>, <strong>, <img> tags etc. If you look at your site in Reader View in Firefox or Safari and it looks OK - that should be good enough
Sounds like an automated version of Pocket, which has been around for ~10 years and is now owned by Mozilla; so the legality aspect of it shouldn't be an issue. I use it daily, although recent versions of the app send you to the original article page, ads and all, should you dare to open it with data/wifi active. Airplane mode still pulls up a text-and-image only version of the article.
The free version has some limitations, like only three articles per rss feed. They offer a self-hosted version for a one-time 35euro fee (although software updates only for one year), which I really appreciate.
I also like reading in my feed reader, which is basically like a automatic offline "reader view" with automatic "read this article" marks. Because of that I quite early decided to never subscribe to a feed which doesn't give me the full article. So I don't ever have this problem. I basically feel that there is so much good content to read out there which I can get delivered to my rss reader directly that I don't really need to jump though the hoops and clicking on 'read more' links and adapting to badly designed websites with really small fonts and gray on white text colors.
Rather than extracting the text, could you just render a cached copy of the full web page? I don't see how anyone would have a problem with that. Many times you will end up missing parts of the article anyway if you try to pare it down.
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).
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.
Nearly perfect for me but I can't stand three column layout apps. Give me a nice condensed list view a la apple mail, and an option to hide the article pane and defer to pop ups (or open in line like inoreader).
How so? I am running the latest Reeder on iOS, and it works great (always has, never found anything that was better overall in terms of reading experience).
304 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadIn any case, I sent him an email with info on how to add it.
I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
Another solution for sites that don't offer their own feeds: http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
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.
One of my favorite webcomics updated very sporadically and didn't provide a RSS feed for the longest time; it was difficult to keep up with updates. The current feed is just a link to the comic and is a significant improvement.
The author was resistant to RSS for the longest time because they thought they _had_ to include the comic in the feed and was worried about losing ad revenue.
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:
[1] https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed[2] https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml
Separately, I really like JSONFeed 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.
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.
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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.
See this section and the one below it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
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
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.
Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.
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.
Of course scope creep adds a burden. It's one more thing Mozilla developers have to tend to.
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.
Mozilla's manifesto is just marketing now — it's obvious they don't really believe it any more.
And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of any relevance at all.
> 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.
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.
You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure.
IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.
Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one.
Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems.
The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.
Further the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensions
And finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement.
Waterfox preserves Live Bookmarks, doesn't do telemetry, was unaffected by expired certificate killing all addons (my FF mobile was affected so I basically had no mobile browser for a few days), among other reasons.
I know after a while I will be forced back to Chromified Firefox when development of Waterfox comes to an end, but at least for now, I can stretch out the moment of a non-Googly browser + Live Bookmarks a few more months or years like whats-her-name in Doctor Strange.
I'm now on Netnewswire 5: https://nnw.ranchero.com/ and write a blog: http://jakeseliger.com that includes a lot of link posts. I still use RSS for all the original reasons, even if most of my friends look puzzled by the acronym "RSS." RSS still solves the "too many sites, too little time" problem extremely well, especially for occasionally updated blogs.
Just for the record, each mastodon-user has its own RSS-feed: https://INSTANCE/@USER.rss
I'm a happy user of Miniflux (hosted myself), but there are many alternatives. https://miniflux.app/
I'm reminded about how some RSS readers support converting email newsletters to a feed.
More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.
If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.
FWIW, there are very few companies who go to as much lengths as Mozilla to optimize for user privacy in their approach to telemetry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/testing-privacy-preserving...
Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time.
However, I think push is way overused. Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Online chats, maybe some of them. CNN publishing "breaking news" that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks.
I'd much rather have the latter class of "notifications" batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption.
RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with "harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing" as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically.
They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. Publishers have wanted this since the dawn of personal computing, because their ultimate dream is to push advertising into your eyeballs without your explicit grant of permission.
Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them. (Truth be told it has never been a priority, they have always focused on "empowering developers," which really means empowering the publishers that those developers work for.) With phones and garbage like the ads in the Windows 10 Start menu, they finally achieved their dream and we're living in their dystopia today.
Safari has a preference for "allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications" (you can also set it on a per-site basis.) iOS is scrupulous about requiring permission for notifications and allows you to configure their annoyingness (plus current iOS asks you if you still want notifications for particularly busy senders.)
> Truth be told it has never been a priority
I mean, it seems to be a priority for Apple in Safari and iOS.
I think the web platform has a long way to go however -- considering what a low quality experience surfing the web can often be these days, it may already be too far gone.
You can also use a meta tag instead if you'd prefer not to display a link. More information can be found over MDN[0] and I also created a blog post on the 5 most important things all blogs should do.[1]
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...
[1]https://michaelbrooks.co.uk/5-important-things-i-learnt-when...
0: https://reederapp.com
Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
Once you subscribe to the podcast, the app itself polls the podcast’s feed and the audio is played directly from the host’s website.
You can also add a podcast directly if you know the feed url.
On top of all that, there has been a freely available API to the podcast directory for years that other podcast players use.
If you want to see a wall garden for podcasts, see Spotify, Google, etc.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/16/apple-will-reportedly-fun...
https://www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/premiumbombcast?api_ke... (you just copy it from the RSS button on their site)
(previously it was https://username:password@www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/prem...)
Seems to work across most apps. I don't see why it would be that hard to build a standard around something similar.
[1] primarily ad-free versions of their main podcasts, but they also have premium-exclusive podcasts
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?
I personally know that a lot of the RSS feeds I am subscribed to I also end up sharing articles with friends. I see these articles early and quick and help create early discussion about them and comment early on them often first. I feel like overall RSS feed users may not directly look hugely beneficial to a site, but can have other impacts hard to track.
Tell that to Stitcher. They have paid Stitcher Premium podcasts that you can only play in their (terrible) app. A third party developer ended up creating "Unofficial RSS Feeds" for them, but who knows how long that will last.
High quality blogs both produce content and link to other high quality content - both things that Google should be interested in to improve search. Instead they decided to capture that information (and eyeballs) with Google+, a calculated gamble that they lost.
If I was king of Google, I would be trying to foster a strong, open blogging community as a backstop against the Facebook's of the world swallowing content inside their non-indexable event horizons.
The King(s) of Google do have a strong blogging community in Blogger, but it was never supposed to be, nor never will be, a backstop against Facebook. It would be better for Google to work within Facebook on this, as bloggers in WordPRess, or MEdium, or whatever announce on social media, guess whose ads are running on the blogs? And I myself as a dev, I'm still searching for the best articles for development practices and more. They don't see that need for us to subscribe to RSS. It's the King(s) of Facebook, Twitter, etc., that need to listen. Giving us a way to watch our subscribed RSS feeds in their own ecosystem will give them the edge on content aggregation.
As far as difficulty in monetizing, John Gruber has been making quite a bit of money for years selling one RSS entry at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week.
Bloomberg is one of the largest new sites; a top 1000 global site and top 200 US site by traffic. It has no RSS feeds.
A little difficult to parse some of the results, but they're there.
I also subscribe to email newsletters that have sponsored links/blurbs in their content, and I'm sure that one could monetize RSS content similarly.
I feel like Randall Munroe is doing well for himself. The math is probably different for smaller players.
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/
[3]: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news
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").
/s
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.
Also, I much rather go to the Youtube site on mobile than use the app.
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.
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
My crisis of conscience was around storing the full text of the articles on my own server and then presenting them as a new feed on my domain, e.g. https://mydomain.com/feeds/eurogamer.xml
Everything in the feed is that gets generated is exactly the same as the original feed (canonical link to the actual article, publsh date, author etc) the only difference was the text in the body of each entry.
As a personal tool you built for yourself and your friend(s) nerdy enough to understand it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as no search engines index your site and no one finds out about it.
Source code of a slightly older version available at: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/
Its a cop out that I still feel bad about. Maybe I will fix it sometime.
If it makes you feel better, you can run your extractor against sheep.horse as much as you want.
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.
Also look at other pages’ rss feeds that include full articles.
Perhaps you should, I enjoyed finding stuff like this : https://danshumway.com/blog/gamasutra-vulnerabilities/
I realize that there are some ways that people serve ads where they vet them and make sure they're not tracking readers. But even if it was easy to set something like that up, I wouldn't feel good running sponsored content or ads on my platforms -- it's not the relationship I want to have with my readers.
I take a much more negative view of ads than most other people I know. I don't just dislike ads that track users or that are poorly vetted. I dislike the psychological effect that ads have on people, I dislike the attention that they take, and I am very cautious of monetization schemes that are too closely integrated into the consumption of content. I can't think of a way I could run ads that wouldn't make reading my blog a worse experience.
I know that's a somewhat extreme position to take. But it's not that advertising is inherently evil, it's just that it has more consequences and costs than most people realize. It's not only about privacy, security, or money.
Given how large the current advertising industry is, where possible I try to block it and harm it indiscriminately. I encourage people to block ads even on websites that they would otherwise support. I think it would be good for society if the advertising industry got a lot smaller, even if that makes funding online content harder.
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!
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.
I guess the main thing you need to provide really is the text and images, <p>, <strong>, <img> tags etc. If you look at your site in Reader View in Firefox or Safari and it looks OK - that should be good enough
The free version has some limitations, like only three articles per rss feed. They offer a self-hosted version for a one-time 35euro fee (although software updates only for one year), which I really appreciate.
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
Feed Directory https://pine.blog/search
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.mvilla.andr...
[1]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed