[HN Gopher] RSS Autodiscovery (2006)
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       RSS Autodiscovery (2006)
        
       Author : mawise
       Score  : 114 points
       Date   : 2023-06-22 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.rssboard.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.rssboard.org)
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | Mozilla removing long standing support for this from Firefox was
       | a clear signal what their browser is for now and what it isn't
       | for. Firefox is for running javascript applications and consuming
       | DRM video and visiting your bank's website, just like chrome. It
       | is not a browser for surfing the web and looking at websites.
        
         | netghost wrote:
         | Honestly the RSS support in Firefox and friends was just never
         | that great. A long time back I used Sage and loved it, but when
         | Firefox moved to use standardized plugins it wasn't an option
         | anymore.
         | 
         | So I built Brook, it's pretty simple and hangs out in your
         | sidebar on Firefox: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
        
       | ilyt wrote:
       | RSS is still only sane way to subscribe to youtube channel, or
       | rather only way that YT managed to not break over the years
        
         | ttepasse wrote:
         | Unfortunately Youtube pushes shorts into the channels feed,
         | presumably because shorts are normal videos under the hood.
         | 
         | For a time shorts had the string "#shorts" in their titles
         | which was great for filtering those out but then youtubers
         | started using custom tags. And filtering for "#" seems too
         | risky.
         | 
         | I recently found out that my feedreader, Feedbin, allows a
         | media_duration field in their search/action syntax. Now I'm
         | using that experimentally for filtering.
         | 
         | Sidenote: Interestingly enough Youtube's feeds don't expose
         | duration. Those feeds are ancient, apparently untouched for 15
         | years. The <media:content> element still advertises its videos
         | as application/x-shockwave-flash. Feedbin, according to its
         | code on Github, does some custom extraction of the duration
         | from the Website for its data model.
         | 
         | (Googlers who may read this: Please, for the love of god, don't
         | change anything. A crappy feed is still better than no feed at
         | all.)
        
         | begriffs wrote:
         | Oh yeah, gotta love the secret feed link.
         | https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$FOO
         | 
         | I follow a number of channels this way. I'm grateful and sort
         | of surprised YouTube hasn't killed it off.
        
           | rollcat wrote:
           | You don't need the "secret" feed link.
           | 
           | You can visit a channel's page directly, and copy the normal
           | URL straight into your feed reader. It will do the right
           | thing - thanks to the <link> tag, which YouTube advertises in
           | the page source - as recommended by TFA. Your feed reader
           | already knows what to do ;)
        
             | begriffs wrote:
             | Interesting, maybe it depends on the reader. I tried a
             | channel just now in newsboat and it wasn't smart enough to
             | find the feed, even though I see the page contains
             | <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
             | title="RSS" href="...">
        
               | rollcat wrote:
               | I use / have used: NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS), RSSGuard,
               | Miniflux, TheOldReader.com, TinyTinyRSS, and some others
               | I forgot about; I don't think I've seen one that doesn't
               | support this feature. Perhaps you should open a bug /
               | support request?
        
               | dannymi wrote:
               | It's in the body--but it's supposed to be in the head.
        
       | thirdplace_ wrote:
       | Related to this topic, I made a website/api that finds feeds for
       | you:
       | 
       | https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=vimeo.com/user4464579
       | 
       | It's pretty rudimentary but alleviates some manual work.
        
       | kevincox wrote:
       | > Supported by Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer
       | 7.0 and other browsers
       | 
       | Unfortunately not supported by Mozilla Firefox 114 or Microsoft
       | Edge.
       | 
       | It is still a very useful standard. I use
       | https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss to add the icon to my
       | browser. Plus even without browser support this allows you to
       | just paste an article into your Feed Reader and most will use
       | autodiscovery to find the feed for you. However without a browser
       | icon you need to guess and check.
        
       | begriffs wrote:
       | I still follow many RSS feeds (about 250). Sometimes it's hard to
       | find the feed on a site, because the feeds aren't always
       | advertised and their URLs can be tricky. Based on the URLs I've
       | seen, I created a simple script to check if a site has a feed:
       | 
       | https://github.com/begriffs/findrss
        
       | garganzol wrote:
       | I suspect that Mozilla got pushed by Google to remove the built-
       | in RSS support surrounding Google+ release.
       | 
       | See, decentralized content delivery such as RSS was not friendly
       | enough to ads, so RSS had to be removed for better profits.
       | 
       | Needless to say that it was a nail in the coffin of internet
       | information quality.
        
       | mawise wrote:
       | Most modern RSS feed-readers still use this `rel=alternate` link
       | to allow users to just paste the URL of the site they want to
       | subscribe to instead of forcing the users to look for and find
       | the RSS link somewhere on the page. It's (surprisingly) very
       | broadly implemented among sites and blogs that publish RSS.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | Why Chrome to this date does not support RSS while all browsers
       | that came before chrome had native support to at least read RSS
       | xml files. Try opening any RSS xml feed in chrome, it will appear
       | as plain XML.
       | 
       | I hold chrome responsible for decline of RSS.
        
       | rmdes wrote:
       | I'm a big fan of FreshRSS (self-hosted) and if I need more
       | powerful feature (such as filtering, dedup, webhooks) I use
       | Inoreader, I have been using at least one rss reader since 2003
       | and there is no way silo's such as Twitter or others can do
       | better than carefully curating ones own information feed.
        
         | toastal wrote:
         | I started self-hosting Miniflux as a New Year's resolution.
         | Very simple layout & integrates with Newsboat.
        
       | zevv wrote:
       | Yes, oh yes, please bring this back.
       | 
       | Firefox used to have this, I used it a lot. Am I that old?
       | 
       | Unfortunately live bookmarks have also gone away in Firefox,
       | luckily I found an add-on for that.
        
         | kevincox wrote:
         | There is an addon for this too
         | https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss (others available but
         | this is what I use).
         | 
         | Although I haven't seen an addon that handles SPA well. Ideally
         | it would monitor the DOM for links being added and removed.
         | Although that may be expensive to do in an extension.
        
       | samwillis wrote:
       | The '00s were such a wonderful time, the explosion in open access
       | information, mashups (how I miss mashups!), easy publishing and
       | the reach you could get from your sofa. RSS is the epitome of
       | that, it's such a shame we have ended up with these walled garden
       | social publishing platforms that lock _our_ content down.
       | 
       | This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired
       | move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to
       | get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
       | 
       | The big thing that has changed since that time is the
       | monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate
       | revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a
       | simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of
       | a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope
       | "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook
       | embracing the fediverse...).
       | 
       | RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a
       | shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't
       | available as RSS.
       | 
       | Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave
       | you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace,
       | Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of
       | that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your
       | page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...
        
         | ozarker wrote:
         | I've been discovering different tools to make the content I
         | consume available via RSS. Some of those tools:
         | 
         | nitter: Alternative Twitter frontend that provides RSS feeds
         | 
         | teddit: Alternative Reddit frontend that provides RSS feeds
         | (Reddit itself still has RSS feeds, we'll see how that plays
         | out though)
         | 
         | rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I
         | use it for Twitch feeds.
         | 
         | invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS feeds
         | 
         | It's been refreshing to subscribe to the feeds I want to see
         | and not have "recommended" content stepping all over what I
         | want to see. Recent trends make me worried some of these
         | services are going to go away in the near future though.
        
           | nanna wrote:
           | Let's not forget https://hnrss.org for hacker news :)
           | 
           | Anyone know a way to pull email lists (eg mailman) via RSS
           | feeds?
        
             | polygamous_bat wrote:
             | "Kill the newsletter!" at https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
             | is one of my favorite tools that does exactly what you're
             | asking for!
        
             | WirelessGigabit wrote:
             | I just use https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
             | 
             | Best of both words. Allows me to go to the article and the
             | comments.
        
           | jjordan wrote:
           | Shout-out to the Livemarks / Foxish plugins which gives you
           | RSS support on your Bookmarks toolbar. Still nothing better
           | IMO for quickly browsing dozens of headlines across dozens of
           | sites.
           | 
           | Firefox: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ Chrome:
           | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-
           | rss/nb...
        
           | flir wrote:
           | > rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different
           | sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
           | 
           | Now that sounds handy. Extensible, too.
        
           | ittner wrote:
           | > rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different
           | sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
           | 
           | A bit of a shameless self-promotion plug: rss-bridge is great
           | but I wanted to do the same from a command line program
           | sending the output to stdout and without running a dedicated
           | local web server, so I wrote newslinkrss (
           | https://github.com/ittner/newslinkrss/ )
           | 
           | It allowed me to replace a bunch of dedicated scripts at the
           | cost of some complex command lines. It works pretty well for
           | people who prefer desktop news readers to web-based ones.
           | 
           | Feedback is welcome.
        
           | ecliptik wrote:
           | I have nitter, teddit, and piped setup similarly and it's
           | game changing having it all available through RSS.
        
           | nordsieck wrote:
           | > invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS
           | feeds
           | 
           | Youtube natively offers per-channel rss feeds.
        
             | ozarker wrote:
             | You're right It's there but they don't make it easy to get
             | a feed. I also like having a single feed with new vids from
             | every channel I'm subscribed to on invidious which I don't
             | think is possible on YouTube
        
             | ixwt wrote:
             | They do, kinda.
             | 
             | You have to go looking for it. In my testing only provides
             | the latest few videos, not the entire back catalog. But I
             | have a naive understanding of the RSS protocol I didn't see
             | how to get more because they didn't expose a "next" link
             | for the RSS feed.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | aaronax wrote:
               | The only place I have ever seen a "next" link for an RSS
               | feed is WordPress. Sort of a pagination thing you can do
               | with the URL.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-22 23:00 UTC)