Maybe you love being the consumer of RSS feeds, but you certainly wouldn't love being the poor bastard who has to parse them.
Even though it's a simple standard that's been around for decades, there are still many sites which serve their feeds with a subtly wrong format. When something doesn't work, users come knocking on your door saying "it works in X reader but not in yours", so now you have to handle that and contribute to the ever growing list of out of spec edge cases that feed readers need to account for.
What sort of punishment should the monopolist google execs who destroyed blogs undergo? A fair punishment might be clawback of all wages and stock options and about five years in a minimum security prison with a permenant felony on their record. I think that's fair.
Wow, what timing. Not to shill, but I'm also nearly done building a directory of RSS feeds. It stemmed from a frustration of outdated and broken RSS feed collections, and the long slow death of the orange RSS subscribe button across the web. I'm not officially launched yet but I would love some feedback and maybe some of the RSS feeds that land in your directory can be added to mine.
Pardon the dust. There's an app tie-in that I'm almost done with too, a widget-first app that shows your RSS feed collections on your phone's home screen. It would really be great if we could start to bring about an RSS renaissance!
This is great. RSS is springing back to life. All it need was for people to reject the hype that came largely from big companies that wanted to and did takeover,
Thanks Dave! Actually I was meaning to reach out, as parsing your site's RSS brought broader support for the format to the entire site. Those title-less blog posts were something else :D I didn't know much about the history of RSS going into this, so I might be your newest fan. Thanks for all of your contributions to the free and open web.
I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago. I started a draft describing some of the problems that actually matter (thing that can’t be represented reliably in RSS, and such) in <https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss>.
And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom.
(I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)
I get your distaste, but RSS is the more famous wording of the technology. I would frame it as "people who love RSS - but technically these are Atom feeds". RSS is the word that stuck and I think we should keep promoting it and on a technical front I am with you - sure, let's use the Atom format "for RSS feeds".
Things that I noticed when I had a look at it: Atom supports multiple authors, RSS doesn't. Some say just separate them with commas, but readers don't understand that and it's all broken. Also Atom supports archive links for pagination to older entries. Some use the atom namespace inside of RSS to use archive links. No idea if there are feed readers that don't support Atom, but do support Atom tags inside of RSS.
Surprisingly cool site. I've seen lots of sites for RSS feeds but they aren't any good because they just dump their mountain of every feed that was ever known to exist, and there's not really any aspects of curation or discovery. RSS feeds themselves embody the exact way I think the internet should work, where the internet itself is the platform. However it's very nice to get some help finding new stuff.
It's great to see someone else using FeedLand. While it has some quirks, is has some clever ideas, like that blogroll feature.
My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...
I'm always surprised how many people who read my blog do so over RSS. It's probably one of my biggest traffic sources. (Definitely due to my niche topic and small reach, but still)
I don't really use RSS myself anymore, though; not since I stopped using Google Reader a few months before they pulled the plug. Wouldn't even know where to start nowadays.
"RSS just needed people to reject the big-company hype" is why Im building my own reader. RSS was never the problem; it's the stuff around it: feeds truncated to a teaser, blogs dying and taking their archives with them, cloud readers logging everything you open.
I'm building Cove (https://covereader.app), a native Mac app that works as a permanent local archive. Excerpt-only feeds get the full article fetched and extracted on-device in an offline WebView, stored LZFSE-compressed. It can also read articles aloud with streaming TTS that runs entirely locally, so nothing that you read leaves the machine. No account, no servers.
Caveats: Mac-only, no sync yet, will be one-time purchase at 1.0 (beta is free now).
26 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 16.8 ms ] threadI wish people would blog more like in the old days.
Even though it's a simple standard that's been around for decades, there are still many sites which serve their feeds with a subtly wrong format. When something doesn't work, users come knocking on your door saying "it works in X reader but not in yours", so now you have to handle that and contribute to the ever growing list of out of spec edge cases that feed readers need to account for.
https://pico.sh/feeds is an ssh app that is an rss-to-email service.
https://rssvault.org
Password is vaultearly644988
Pardon the dust. There's an app tie-in that I'm almost done with too, a widget-first app that shows your RSS feed collections on your phone's home screen. It would really be great if we could start to bring about an RSS renaissance!
And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom.
(I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)
My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...
I don't really use RSS myself anymore, though; not since I stopped using Google Reader a few months before they pulled the plug. Wouldn't even know where to start nowadays.
I'm building Cove (https://covereader.app), a native Mac app that works as a permanent local archive. Excerpt-only feeds get the full article fetched and extracted on-device in an offline WebView, stored LZFSE-compressed. It can also read articles aloud with streaming TTS that runs entirely locally, so nothing that you read leaves the machine. No account, no servers.
Caveats: Mac-only, no sync yet, will be one-time purchase at 1.0 (beta is free now).