[HN Gopher] Kill the Newsletter - Convert email newsletters into...
___________________________________________________________________
Kill the Newsletter - Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
Author : polm23
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-02-17 15:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kill-the-newsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kill-the-newsletter.com)
| petecooper wrote:
| Aside: a question for proponents of syndication (e.g. Atom, RSS)
| - as a publisher, are there other formats that should be
| investigated?
| Siilwyn wrote:
| There is also a new format for JSON feeds:
| https://jsonfeed.org/
| onli wrote:
| No. You need only one, either Atom or RSS.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I'm inclined to say no.
|
| RSS and Atom are great. And I wish I could get every newsletter
| as feed instead. Emails get lost in the daily avalanche, but
| RSS/Atom feeds know to wait until I have time to read. But
| they're already beset by problems with lack of adoption. Any
| alternative syndication tool is going to make it even harder to
| reach your audience.
|
| I'd also be careful about platforms like Medium. I wanted to
| like Medium, I really did, but the algorithmic feed's constant
| stream of clickbait quickly grew tiring. I ended up muting it,
| newsletters and all. It seems to me that any platform that has
| an algorithm is setting up a hostile environment for people who
| don't enjoy producing or consuming clickbait.
| benlumen wrote:
| Nice idea.
|
| Related - Is there anything that can add the select number of
| Twitter accounts I want to follow to this Atom or RSS feed?
|
| Without exposing myself to toxic replies, toxic suggested tweets
| and toxic trending topics? I've thought for years there should be
| something like that. Presumably it's a grey area with APIs or
| scraping.
| firloop wrote:
| Newsblur does let you follow Twitter accounts; they have an API
| integration. Tweets from accounts you follow show up as stories
| in your reader.
| erikschoster wrote:
| I follow a couple friends via the RSS feed created by
| nitter.net: https://nitter.net
| Ambroisie wrote:
| I believe you can use Rss-bridge to follow Twitter users.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I'm sure there's a way to do it but Twitter dropped RSS/Atom
| support from their API in 2012 [1], so it would require
| scraping or using some sort of other endpoint-managed control
| of the feed. There have historically been usage limits on how
| many tweets you could retrieve without paying, but I'm not sure
| how much that has changed since Twitter overhauled its API last
| year.
|
| It's a shame that many of the tools and features we had a
| decade ago no longer exist, not because of technology, but
| because of decisions social networks made for business reasons
| to eschew open standards and create their own walled gardens.
|
| [1]: https://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-api-rss/
| firloop wrote:
| Definitely a great tool. I used to use it but now mostly use the
| Newsblur native version of this feature. I blogged about my
| specific stack for reading newsletters because it takes a
| surprising amount of configuration to read newsletters in a
| streamlined way. Once you get a Gmail filter set up for the big
| services like Substack it becomes pretty painless though.
|
| https://ylukem.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-newsletters
| acco102 wrote:
| Use https://mailnesia.com/ or https://tempr.email/ and rss.
| unicornporn wrote:
| I use this: https://notifier.in/
|
| Same thing, works well. Newsletters are plague.
| dewey wrote:
| > Newsletters are plague.
|
| That really depends on how you use email. I always have a very
| empty email inbox and newsletters stay there until I read them
| (I'm talking about newsletters from people, not the latest
| deals on some ecommerce website).
| ghaff wrote:
| I wouldn't call them a plague but it's easy to drown in stuff
| being pushed out via email. So you end up filtering and it all
| goes into a folder you never look at.
| cameronbrown wrote:
| I actually built something that was the complete inverse, RSS to
| email. Avoiding email because your inbox is full is like deciding
| not to drive because you didn't fill up the petrol tank. It's
| just putting a problem off to the future.
| gxqoz wrote:
| It's been a long time since I've used an RSS reader. I've moved
| to a read-it-later app like Pocket. Do any RSS readers provide
| all of the following functionality:
|
| -Let me highlight / add notes. -Randomly add things not in my
| usual RSS feeds, i.e. from some website I'm browsing. -Listen to
| articles via text to speech. -Work well across web, iOS and
| Android.
|
| I've been less and less happy with Pocket as it's clear that it's
| become less of a priority for Mozilla.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Ironically I convert atom feeds into email newsletters using
| rss2email. One less app to keep open.
| neogodless wrote:
| Ha! I had almost forgot. About a decade ago (time frame made up
| / guessed) I used Thunderbird as my RSS reader. Just checked
| and it can still do that. Since it's my primary email reader,
| voila!
|
| (But I use Feedly.com web site on computer and Feedly app on
| phone now which is easier for managing RSS than Thunderbird by
| a mile. Though looking below there is Export/Import of feeds,
| I'm not sure there's a way to just sync them up everywhere. And
| I don't use Thunderbird on my phone!)
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
| beagle3 wrote:
| I used to use thunderbird to read RSS. The problem though is
| that if you don't poll often enough (and for some feeds,
| that's every few hours) you'll miss articles and updates --
| and my laptop is sometimes off for a couple of days.
|
| I've switched to NewsBlur a few years ago. Happy paying
| customer. (But bot affiliated). The bonus is synchronized
| phone/laptop/desktop reading status.
| xpil wrote:
| I've been using NewsBlur since G killed Reader. Great
| service!
| wiw2 wrote:
| One of my favorite hacks: I made a google appscript that
| scans a list of RSS feeds to email weekly digests.
| Surprisingly simple, and much more useful then running a
| separate RSS reader in my opinion.
|
| I have to confess: little automations like this with low
| barrier of entry is where I find most value in tech.
| Simple and practical.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Can you combine those two to get rid of privacy breaking stuff
| like tracking pixels? First sign up with Kill the newsletter to
| convert to rss, and then use rss2email to get a scrubbed
| version of the email?
| foreigner wrote:
| I smell an entertaining loop!
| hansy wrote:
| Even for my own newsletter (https://funnies.page) I set up email
| filters so I wouldn't get email notifications in the morning.
| Eventually added RSS and the option to disable emails entirely.
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| By the way, I found thematic newsletters like Import AI or the
| Johns Hopkins University Covid newsletter very useful lately and
| have been looking out for more of them.
|
| I want to stay up to date with what is happening in ML (and in
| the world) but don't want to burn time manually opening up RSS
| readers, RedditML or news websites every day, given all their
| abusive time-stealing distractions and soul-crushingly dumb
| comments. I strongly prefer a weekly or daily carefully curated
| summary automatically delivered to my inbox. Hopefully these
| curated e-mail newsletters will become a thing again.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Some people have good control over their email inbox. Some don't.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| How about... we do both? Because it's not exactly too much effort
| to set up an atom and rss feed to go along with your email
| newsletter.
|
| Can we stop (subtly in this case, not so subtly in others)
| crusading against tech that we don't _personally_ like, when
| thousands upon thousands rely on it because that 's the format
| they're comfortable with and want to receive periodicals in?
|
| Set up a system that meets people where they are instead of
| forcing them into only your preferred delivery flavour.
| asjldkfin wrote:
| I know you mean well, but this post is genuinely idiotic and
| the definition of a straw-man argument.
|
| That, or you did not even bother clicking into the link and see
| what it is.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I did, I'm taking exception with the whole "kill the
| newsletter" rallying cry. It's a bad call, and any "kill X!"
| should be questioned even if what it's used to market is a
| perfectly fine tool.
| sgeisler wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what the submission is about? It seems to be
| a tool to convert any newsletter into an atom feed by creating
| a fake inbox. This lets everyone consume the content in their
| preferred format. Sure it would be nice if newsletters were
| available as news feeds too, but in the meantime this is a nice
| hack.
| iamdamian wrote:
| I'd guess that the OP is responding to the phrase "kill the
| newsletter" rather than the specific tool.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| that.
|
| It's a perfectly fine tool, but "kill the newsletter" is an
| incredibly bad rallying cry and should be questioned.
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| it's just a catchy name!
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| What am I missing? You name the feed and then get a link to
| subscribe to it. How does the supply side actually provide the
| newsletter/content that will be distributed to that address?
| rmetzler wrote:
| You also get an email address to subscribe to the email list
| with.
| Glench wrote:
| I love this service. Been using it for a long time and have
| switched all my newsletters to it. Now I get so many fewer
| emails. As the creators of Hey figured out, it's wonderful to
| have a separate feed of newsletters since they're fundamentally
| different than other types of email -- they're generally not
| urgent and don't need to be acted upon. I keep mine in my RSS
| reader BazQux.
| hiidrew wrote:
| That's funny, I've always thought about a project that does the
| opposite since I love newsletters but not ever RSS source
| supports them
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I think we should go the opposite way. I think we should push
| more onto email. email is pretty ubiquitous. Nearly everyone
| online has email. It's as close to universal as anything else for
| accessing people. Instead of having a dozen different chat apps,
| push chats to email. Instead of a half dozen Slack wannabe apps,
| push all that to email. We should expand the email protocol to
| support that.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Two reasons why I don't think this is a good idea:
|
| 1. Mixing different applications in one inbox would be a mess
| for a lot of people (e.g. your IM would drown out important
| work email)
|
| 2. Privacy - avoiding unique online identifiers when they're
| not needed is a good idea
| petercooper wrote:
| I think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a
| matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the
| end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g.
| https://javascriptweekly.com/rss
|
| With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities
| for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds _generally_. I
| think it 'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low
| priority emails landing at the 101 spare domain names I have to
| turn up in a single feed somehow rather than be forwarded.
| imglorp wrote:
| Another HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter
| mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness.
|
| I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would
| make them sad.
| samizdis wrote:
| In case anyone's missed it, that's this thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26162513
|
| - from the BBC article _' Spy pixels in emails have become
| endemic'_
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56071437
| WWWWH wrote:
| It's doable already. I do this with some low priority emails
| and marketing newsletters---a gmail filter sends to a custom
| email address of my rss reader. It's useful for getting low
| priority stuff out of my inbox.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| I love this service. I use it to subscribe to a few newsletters
| in Feedly that don't offer RSS feeds.
|
| The paid versions of Feedly and Feedbin also offer this
| functionality directly if you prefer to pay for the privilege of
| consuming newsletters in your RSS reader.
| briandoll wrote:
| Came here to say this, love how this works in Feedbin:
| https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...
| Semiapies wrote:
| Yeah, I'd be all over this service, but I'm a Feedbin user.
|
| I'm reminded of 15-20 years ago, when there were services to
| create RSS feeds of webcomics that didn't have them.
| dethos wrote:
| Newsblur, which is a very good feed reader, has this feature
| built-in which is super handy to keep all this stuff in one
| place.
| kureikain wrote:
| I think it came down to personal preferences. I tried to use RSS
| but it's yet another app that I cannot form a habit to check it.
| Plus I like the personal look and feel of each email newsletter I
| got.
|
| I instead of relying on email as a real time news feed. But
| getting too many emails I have to category and make miss some
| exciting development news.
|
| I though of this, why not combine all of the newsletter and
| display them on a single page, easy to remember URL that I can
| check anytime.
|
| And make this:
|
| https://hanami.run/channel/devnews
|
| The idea is I can have many channel, each channel subscribe to a
| bunch of newsletter and I just read them from here. Example my
| morning news:
|
| https://hanami.run/channel/news
| mikece wrote:
| Why Atom instead of RSS? I understand the differences between the
| two formats[1] but I am curious what it is about Atom that caused
| the maker of this project to choose it over RSS.
|
| [1] http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-
| betwe...
| lucideer wrote:
| The article you link lists numerous advantages to using Atom
| over RSS (and no advantages to RSS). Why would you consider RSS
| over Atom?
| pvorb wrote:
| I wonder why anyone would still use RSS over Atom. Atom was
| already supported by virtually all feed readers when Google
| Reader was shut down. And that was nearly 8 years ago.
|
| The only reason I can think of is that people often use RSS
| synonymously to feeds.
| mmastrac wrote:
| RSS is useful as a creator because it's so under-specified
| that you can create valid RSS with virtually no effort (ie:
| printf). It's a huge pain to consume it because every
| single library needs to have crazy hacks to do things like
| double-unescaping HTML.
|
| Atom is the better format, but - like any time you work
| with XML - you should never try to hand-bomb string output.
| Use an XML library, or preferably an Atom library.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I'd be far happier emitting Atom via printf than RSS via
| printf. The Atom spec tells me what I should write,
| whereas RSS goes in for unspecified behaviour and exotic
| date formats that force me to look up strftime. Beyond
| that, they're both XML, which is easy to write.
| ncphil wrote:
| The first time I realized Atom and RSS were actually
| different standards was when I went to write a feed. "Oh.
| Well that's interesting..."
| billyhoffman wrote:
| That article also has an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, and
| wastes a request trying to load JavasScript for Google
| Plus.... this is not up-to-date information.
|
| The "advantages" are minor at best, and exclusively relevant
| to a developer, with very little impact on the end-user
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Not _exclusively_ relevant to a developer.
|
| I have one or two things in my feeds that can't be
| expressed in RSS, such as HTML markup in my titles (which I
| use for <strong>, <code> and I think <em>). I also have
| angle brackets in a title, which I would be afraid to do in
| RSS because I'm confident that some clients would butcher
| it, and they wouldn't even be _wrong_ since RSS don't care.
| mikece wrote:
| This, to me, makes me ask what the _purpose_ of a feed
| even is. If it 's to deliver data then RSS, Atom, JSON,
| or YAML shouldn't make any different at all. But if it's
| to deliver data _and_ markup... now we 're making
| decisions a client could override at best or result in
| unreadable/a11y unfriendly content at worst. Maybe it's
| just me but I've never considered the feed as a place to
| be putting markup but even if we want to go that route
| then RSS's <![CDATA[ ... ]]> addresses this. What am I
| missing?
| kemayo wrote:
| Markup's part of the data. Particularly in chrismorgan's
| example, where it's semantic content.
|
| As for CDATA, I think you're right that it'd work in this
| case (assuming that client apps cope with it there, but
| if the Atom equivalent works then presumably it should).
|
| I suspect that what we're looking at here is software
| which is poorly generating its RSS. Probably Wordpress,
| since I'm at least fairly confident that it doesn't put
| CDATA in its item titles regardless of their content.
| kemayo wrote:
| > exclusively relevant to a developer
|
| Which would presumably be why the developer chose it, yes.
| lucideer wrote:
| I wasn't expressing any opinion one way or the other, nor
| did I provide the article as a reference. The original
| commenter seemed to be questioning the choice of Atom over
| RSS, and that article is what they posted as their
| reference; which seemed odd to me since it argues for using
| Atom over RSS.
|
| Why would _you_ consider RSS over Atom (you seem to exhibit
| a preference but you have also neglected to list any of the
| reasons)?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Atom is technically substantially superior to RSS. RSS is
| riddled with ambiguities which lead to inconsistency of
| interpretation, and being outright unable to express some
| useful things.
|
| My favourite is the format of all content: is it HTML or text?
| RSS doesn't care, and leaves you to guess. So people added a
| namespace to fix that up, and you end up with what I think is
| normally spelled <content:encoded> to replace <description> or
| whatever it is--but there's no equivalent for other content
| fields like titles. And because you can't trust that tool will
| use <content:encoded>, now you need both. (And when you get to
| podcasts, the theme of the day is having the same field
| expressed in four or five different namespaces for different
| tools, in some cases for things that Atom has but RSS lacks.)
|
| I have an article on my blog entitled <_>::v::<_>. I expect
| that a few RSS readers would mangle it if I served an RSS feed,
| but I serve an Atom feed, so I can express the title correctly:
| <title type="html"><code>&lt;_&gt;::v::&lt;_&
| amp;gt;</code></title>
|
| (Bet you didn't anticipate the <code> wrapping of that title!
| Now try _that_ in RSS!) Anyway, NewsBlur got it right, and if
| any other client gets it wrong I can point to it and say that
| it is unequivocally a bug, whereas with RSS... eh, there's
| enough ambiguity to drive a spaceship through, so what does
| "bug" even mean?
|
| I hate the way that feeds are so commonly generically called
| "RSS", because it gives mindshare to the bad and inferior
| product.
|
| The only reason you should _ever_ use RSS feeds is because
| you're dealing with podcasts, because Apple sadly ignored the
| emerging Atom format when they did podcasts in iTunes in 2005,
| and annoyingly froze things in time there and then, and
| everyone else stupidly followed them, so that most of the major
| podcast things don't support Atom... even if they sometimes
| claim to. (Like validation tools that allege that Atom is fine,
| butcher it completely if you give it to them, and report false
| results like that this RSS feed is fine or whatnot.)
| beagle3 wrote:
| I am a paying NewsBlur customer and like it very much.
|
| It is, however, too picky about atom/rss - if you have a feed
| with some wrong entries (e.g. the one from freshcode.club) it
| will discard the problem items without a warning while still
| showing the valid items.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Omg, newsletters and email groups work so much better than most
| other attempts to replace. Are there data that support this
| claim, though?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| What's wrong with email newsletters? I actually like them quite a
| bit.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| For me, they get lost amidst the mountains of other email I
| get. I also don't like reading longer form content in my mail
| app. Having them sent to an RSS reader where I'm already
| reading news is a nice way to avoid those clashes of context.
| tutuca wrote:
| And the format is in a some kind of revival. Some of the best
| content I get is from newsletters these days.
| enonevets wrote:
| Not OP but for me I prefer subscribing via RSS as it helps
| organize what I follow rather than add to more clutter in my
| inbox.
| jasonv wrote:
| You have to view and manage and then delete them.
|
| 99% of my inboxes are emails from non-humans. I'm ready to
| stream them like RSS or Twitter.. and catch the ones I care
| about.
| [deleted]
| t0astbread wrote:
| For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to
| give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you
| individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if
| you give out your real email address.
|
| The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized
| newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use
| your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter
| messages.
| bmj wrote:
| _it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your
| real email address_
|
| Is this the same class of privacy issue as, say, subscribing
| to a print journal that is delivered directly to your place
| of residence (as opposed to a post office box)? I think you
| could even argue that using anonymized email addresses for
| your newsletter subscriptions could be the digital equivalent
| of a PO box, right?
| t0astbread wrote:
| I think we mean the same thing, yes. (See my response to a
| sibling about newsletter hosts building interest
| profiles[1].)
|
| The PO box analogy kinda falls apart unless you use a
| separate PO box per subscription but you're right, email
| aliases protect you from any kind of advertiser profiling.
| Feeds are just nice because they're simple HTTP requests so
| they don't have that problem in the first place (unless
| you're worried about IP-based tracking and don't use any
| kind of proxy).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I guess I've just never really considered my email address as
| some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Neither do I, really, but I would be concerned about
| newsletter hosts being able to build a profile of my
| interests based on what I'm subscribed to.
|
| If I can just use Atom/RSS over HTTP instead I can avoid
| that easily.
| raybb wrote:
| I've used this a good bit and struggled with two things:
|
| 1. Newsletter formatting sometimes gets broken and comes out ugly
|
| 2. For longer newsletters or digests I sometimes skim too fast
| since I'm used to having single articles in rss feed. I guess
| this is more a comment on my reading habits with rss.
| NAR8789 wrote:
| FYI, the author has a patreon: https://www.patreon.com/leafac
|
| (I hunted this down by clicking through to his bio first. Not
| sure why he doesn't put a link to it on the kill-the-newsletter
| front page)
|
| (Not associated with the author in any way. Just a happy user)
| rmetzler wrote:
| I love that the author is doing code reviews on youtube and shows
| his own opensource code for the service.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMTb3Z-QiPY
| synergy20 wrote:
| Actually I rely more and more on email(newsletters) after all
| these years. I subscribed to quite a few newsletters and each
| morning I just check the inbox, no need to visit 10+ different
| sites, it's all in my inbox and mostly I just need browser them
| and click on a few subjects I'm truly interested, thus less time
| spending on ads from different sites. I installed a RSS extension
| on the browser and still ended up back to the inbox, I disabled
| the RSS reader a while ago.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Worth noting that Substack already publishes feeds at
| YOURNAMEHERE.substack.com/feed
|
| There are other newsletter publishers, of course, but that seems
| to be the one I get the most from.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-17 21:00 UTC)