[HN Gopher] An example of why RSS is useful and important
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An example of why RSS is useful and important
Author : ChrisHardie
Score : 125 points
Date : 2022-02-18 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tech.chrishardie.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tech.chrishardie.com)
| ianbicking wrote:
| Instead of convincing me of the benefits of RSS, I think you've
| convinced me that someone should sign up for every government
| newsletter possible and do something really interesting to
| present that information to the public. Like maybe I don't just
| want to know about water alerts in my town, but I'd like to know
| something about water alerts anywhere in the country. Or when I'm
| visiting somewhere can I get snowplow alerts without digging
| through local sites? I imagine there's a lot of interesting stuff
| in those newsletters that I haven't even considered...
| latexr wrote:
| > So for fun, I wanted to see how many steps it would take to get
| the information contained in those alerts into a usable RSS feed.
|
| The author did it for fun, but if you ever find yourself in this
| situation and need a solution fast, consider Kill The
| Newsletter[1]. Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open
| source[2].
|
| [1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com
|
| [2]: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter
| clircle wrote:
| It's crazy that rss is so unpopular now that we need a post
| asserting that it has just a smidgen of utility.
|
| For me, it's the separation of church and state: email is for
| updates specific to me, rss is for updates that aren't specific
| to me
| upofadown wrote:
| My city does email for alerts and RSS for news releases.
|
| >But it still locks the information up inside my email inbox, and
| subjects it to the fragility of email delivery these days; will
| the town's email servers be allowed to deliver the message?
|
| I think in practice that fragility is mostly Gmail and some of
| the other big free email providers. Email providers that actually
| care will normally make it so you can at least get your email
| reliably.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it
| worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds
| of futile submissions that preach to the choir.
|
| Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does
| something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into
| a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own
| website-to-RSS gateway.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out
| for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours
| maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler.
|
| It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things
| differently. For example, relative paths should be supported
| with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something
| like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.
| k1m wrote:
| I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build
| RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org
|
| But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more
| maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a
| look.
| nijave wrote:
| I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to
| hyper targeted marketing and tracking.
|
| With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what
| times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the
| specific person
|
| RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great
| for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize
| monetization
| smm11 wrote:
| Blogger remains all the world will ever need.
| l72 wrote:
| I did something similar for Bandcamp. Back in the day, Bandcamp
| had decent RSS feeds, but they dropped them several years ago.
| Following labels on Bandcamp is one of my main ways of music
| discovery, but using Bandcamp's "feed" or getting emails wasn't
| cutting it for me.
|
| So, I wrote something simpler using imapfilter to filter Bandcamp
| emails and convert them to RSS feeds, which I can read with my
| freshrss self hosted instance.
|
| https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| I have a similar problem: I'd _love_ to have all of my Patreon
| posts in my RSS reader instead of their shitty app or website.
| That 's sadly not possible. So I'm automatically redirecting all
| of my Patreon emails to my RSS hosted - which does provide an
| "email to RSS" feature. It's not perfect, but it works fairly
| well
| ctrlaltdylan wrote:
| Instead of hand coding a scraper or subscribing to email driven
| webhooks, and managing that bespoke code - take a look at
| Pipedream.com
|
| You can chain together low code steps. An email address can be a
| trigger, or just a simple timer.
|
| Then you can post results to Slack/Discord with pre built
| actions, it's a lot less work. No hosting to worry about either.
| You just build in the dashboard and the steps are hosted by
| Pipedream.
| charcircuit wrote:
| For the average person email alerts are going to be much more
| useful than RSS "alerts." Almost everyone uses email where very
| few people use RSS.
| Daunk wrote:
| I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always
| been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one
| where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter
| through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get
| notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists.
| I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other
| things, then set what kind of notification I'll get based on
| tags. One tag might give an actual toast notification, one might
| just be highlighted, others might be dimmed and marked as
| "uninteresting" and some might be straight up hidden. So far I've
| not found a single RSS reader I like and they all just sort of
| act like a basic email client, and usually don't do cross-
| platform either.
| coldpie wrote:
| I don't think it gets quite to the level of customization you
| want, but I find Feedly to be very good and is definitely
| cross-platform. Give it a try if you haven't. The for-pay Pro
| model has some extra features, and I have had good luck
| contacting their support.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Does one of you want to give a try to lenns.io? That's a new
| type of RSS reader I'm working on. It has import/export so
| you can try and leave easily.
|
| I'm planning for the aforementioned customizations but they
| are still a few months away.
| O_H_E wrote:
| I would definitely be happy to alpha/beta test a
| "different" RSS reader.
|
| Disclaimer: I have used RSS consistently yet, but I have
| installed a few readers and tried them over the years. Just
| never broke the old habits. But I should know the gist of
| it.
|
| feel free to be annoying and email me at the address in my
| profile if you ever want to (for feedback, brainstorming...
| etc).
| albertsun wrote:
| Try https://www.newsblur.com/ it does a lot of what you're
| asking for and works well on web and mobile app.
| Naac wrote:
| https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I use FreshRSS which is hosted on my home server. What it does
| is allow you to categorise the feeds and you can also do some
| further things like hiding them from the main feed if you
| choose to. Then beyond that it pulls article tags from the
| original sites which you can search or predefine a filter for
| and you can also label individual articles you find. What it
| can't do unfortunately is allow multiple tags for a site to be
| applied, so its not possible to classify content from a source
| multiple ways and have it surfaced in multiple places while
| only having it shown once and read once. You can put a site in
| multiple categories but reading it in one place wont read it in
| the other.
|
| It is one of the better systems I have used, its by no means
| perfect but its fairly quick and easy to use with some decent
| shortcuts for working through the sites and I manage hundreds
| with it and it happily works across every platform since its a
| website.
| smbv wrote:
| +1 for FreshRSS. Use that with NetNewsWire[0] as a client and
| RSS looks very nice.
|
| [0] https://netnewswire.com
| u2077 wrote:
| So you want to create regex based filters that:
| - Sort articles into lists - Tag articles by
| category - Dim articles that may be uninteresting
| - Highlight articles you are most likely to enjoy -
| Also have various notification preferences
| rado wrote:
| https://netnewswire.com is one of the best apps I use
| regularly, not just among RSS clients. Good point about tags
| etc though.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for
| reading feeds.
|
| I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility
| itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon
| regular expressions, and similar things.
|
| It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed
| itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll
| find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or
| article. Those are a bit harder to handle.
| Naac wrote:
| There is also the much more complete rss2email tool (
| originally started by Aaron Swartz )
|
| https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't
| excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of
| the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader
| with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple &
| Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much
| freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or
| some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing
| the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme
| selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of
| custom styles and support for per-feed defaults.
|
| Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well
| positioned to support.
|
| Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so
| blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do
| what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me,
| thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:
| alx__ wrote:
| I've been using Inoreader and enjoy it. I'm only using the free
| plan, but the paid versions seem to offer some of the things
| you're looking for.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Sounds like you want something that uses RSS data to build a
| more freeform database.
|
| I wouldn't describe RSS software as bad but they do often
| prioritize the reading experience, which is in conflict with
| data management due to the small market keeping developer
| resources minimal.
| nefitty wrote:
| Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the
| sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.
| avar wrote:
| There's multiple RSS to Email services (and trivial open source
| software you can use to convert RSS feeds to E-Mails to
| yourself).
|
| Isn't that what you're looking for? Then you can use any
| non-"basic email client" to get all the sorts of advanced
| filtering etc. you're describing.
| kinduff wrote:
| I love RSS, have my own instance of Miniflux [1] on my Raspberry
| Pi and I got it connected with Discord and Matrix to read
| articles on the go.
|
| [1]: https://miniflux.app/
| kevincox wrote:
| I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same
| functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference
| is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an
| alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can
| be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down".
|
| Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you
| know you want the feed, so spam is almost a non-issue. However I
| have seen it the other way where my feed reader is blocked
| because they have "bot protection" on the RSS feed. This can be
| called a misconfiguration, but it is a common misconfiguration,
| and there will always be some level of protection on a feed
| because in the case of DoS you want to try to filter out the
| attackers. I guess for something this urgent you can configure
| your reader to alert you on failures to check but that is not
| even supported by a lot of readers.
|
| The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my
| subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and
| hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere.
|
| The main advantage of email is that it is natively push, so the
| updates will almost always be faster (greylisting aside...). This
| can be resolved with WebSub but support for that is very rare.
|
| At the end of the day they are both open protocols and you can
| handle them however you want, although the infrastructure for RSS
| is probably more inline with this use case.
|
| But then again, I read my RSS feeds via email anyways, so I'm
| probably biased. My proposal? Support both. RSS is trivial to add
| support for, and if you have an RSS feed you can add a "subscribe
| by email" form in a couple clicks using existing services.
|
| And overall these public alerts are a seriously unsolved problem.
| When I lived in Dublin, IE there was a water advisory like this
| and their only notification mechanism was TV+radio. As with most
| people under the age of 30 I don't frequently listen to TV or
| radio so could have been drinking contaminated water for days. I
| was shocked that they didn't send out a cell-based emergency
| alert for everyone in the area. But even that wouldn't have
| caught everything. It would be amazing if my city, province and
| country all had emergency alerts that I could subscribe to via
| RSS and email.
| eichin wrote:
| heh. In 2003-2005 I didn't get why RSS mattered, so I built a
| mobile photo blog based on pictures+text from a Sony Clie email
| client, posting pictures + captions to a mailbox, and a
| .forward file pipe-filter that turned those messages directly
| into an RSS feed. (About 50 lines of sh - "why do people think
| this is hard or complicated?" :-)
|
| Turns out (1) UI matters (2) Network Effect matters (3) systems
| that gamify user engagement basically _always_ win regardless
| of what they 're doing...
| spicybright wrote:
| Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS
| is worth it for emergency alerts.
|
| I'm willing to bet good money <0.5% of the population even use
| or are aware of RSS. Supporting it also has a very non-trivial
| cost. Even if it takes a few hours for an engineer to implement
| it, it'll need to be added to their testing plan to make sure
| it's reliable.
|
| Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie
| ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is
| relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for
| catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails.
|
| So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out
| to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other
| proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line,
| so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same
| way existing emergency systems are.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my
| subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop,
| and hope that you haven 't sold my email address elsewhere._
|
| Sadly too many places think that subaddresses--
| username+label_at_example.com --is an invalid address. Can't
| use it in usernames in many places. (It's been valid in e-mail
| since RFC 822.)
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| This is one of the reasons that motivated me to get an email
| forwarding service with my domain, everything at
| prefix(.*)@mydomain.tld is forwarded to my email address, and
| there's no special character to block. I can then block
| specific addresses that have been sold to spammers
| karencarits wrote:
| I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for
| more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list
| with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a
| web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page
| in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to
| keep an archive of important stuff
| bandie91 wrote:
| at least Delta Chat[1] builds Instant Messaging on the email
| infrastructure.
|
| [1] https://delta.chat
| gowld wrote:
| Richard Stallman browses the web via email.
|
| https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
|
| > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own
| machine, aside from a few sites I have some special
| relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites
| by sending mail to a program (see
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches
| them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I
| look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see
| the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first,
| then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using
| konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a
| situation).
|
| > perfect to keep an archive of important stuff
|
| Most stuff is not important.
| [deleted]
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