[HN Gopher] Why your blog still needs RSS
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why your blog still needs RSS
        
       Author : imadj
       Score  : 203 points
       Date   : 2023-08-18 13:17 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journal.paoloamoroso.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journal.paoloamoroso.com)
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | And browsers need to add RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and display
       | (as the little feed icon in the URL bar) back to the browser. It
       | was removed in 2018 by Firefox for no reason at all.
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | > for no reason at all
         | 
         | It was buggy and in a format that was almost useless.
         | 
         | If you complained about losing the RSS reader on the Mozilla to
         | Firefox transition, then yeah, that was a loss. But the FF one
         | was never an option.
        
           | toastal wrote:
           | I used to use Fx's Live Bookmarks all the time back when it
           | was still around. It made sense in organizing ones bookmarks
           | to also have feeds.
        
       | diimdeep wrote:
       | Someone should delve into history and investigate who exactly
       | comprises the group of people in big tech that are responsible
       | for the demise of the RSS/ATOM brands. Yes, it was Google that
       | shut down Reader, but who were the individuals behind this
       | decision? Who removed RSS from Firefox?
       | 
       | Even on this blog, there is only an email newsletter UI, and no
       | evident way discover and to access the RSS feed unless you
       | intentionally inspect the webpage source code or have installed a
       | browser add-on.
        
       | samsquire wrote:
       | At one point I used wordpress as my blog but then I moved to just
       | using GitHub README.md as my tech ideas journals.
       | 
       | The idea is I don't need a RSS feed because I publish 100-800
       | entries in one README.md file, then announce that batch of items
       | (samsquire/ideas samsquire/ideas2 samsquire/ideas3
       | samsquire/ideas4 samsquire/ideas5)
       | 
       | In other words, a batch of entries is already a feed, because
       | it's just a big document and that document should be immutable
       | when I announce it finished.
       | 
       | To append to a journal, I append to the bottom. To append to the
       | blog, I prepend to the top.
       | 
       | Low tech but it really encourages me to write down my thoughts.
        
         | sph wrote:
         | Hey Sam, as a counterpoint I'd really love if your ideas were
         | somewhere with an RSS feed. I'd immediately add it to my
         | Feedbin account
         | 
         | (I'll reply to your email in a bit, was a little busy these
         | days)
        
           | samsquire wrote:
           | Thanks sph!
           | 
           | Maybe I'll write a markdown heading to RSS script?
        
             | berkes wrote:
             | IIRC it's not hard to subscribe to the commit log over RSS.
             | I'd suspect the commit log might resemble the progress of
             | the notes? One idea per commit, maybe?
        
         | knorker wrote:
         | It works fine, as long as you don't care if anyone reads it;
         | Not all writing is for other people.
         | 
         | If a blog like thing doesn't have RSS, and it's good, then I
         | think "shame I'll never see anything this person writes ever
         | again".
        
           | Paul-Craft wrote:
           | But do I want you as one of my readers, as the article
           | suggests?
           | 
           | Not that I"m specifically picking on you, but I'm just seeing
           | a lot of statements in the article and no data. It's "all
           | hat, no cattle," so to speak.
        
             | knorker wrote:
             | Like I said, not all writing is for other people.
        
           | samsquire wrote:
           | I think there is a market problem of attention. Search
           | engines, advertisements, social media attempt to solve it.
           | There is also the problem of unsolicited sharing or spam. How
           | do you find the good stuff without reading through lots of
           | stuff you don't want? You curate RSS feeds is one solution.
           | 
           | If you don't want to invest in seeking that author again into
           | something you were freely getting that was good, then the sad
           | outcome is the lack of effort/investment on both sides (not
           | providing a RSS feed, not remembering the author's website or
           | name)
           | 
           | See: why open source software is never good enough, even
           | though it is free. See: if you don't invest in your
           | blog/website, why should I invest my time into it?
           | 
           | I have the same problem with GitHub projects. People spend a
           | lot of time creating a wonderful GitHub project (they focus
           | on the code), which is good, but they don't invest in the
           | README.md and create good documentation. So I might star it
           | and forget about it.
           | 
           | If you're creating a GitHub project, please write copious
           | amounts the ideas, mental model and thoughts on the README.md
           | 
           | It's probably entitled because I want to benefit from other's
           | GitHub projects. But when I'm presented with a paragraph
           | about the code, it would be a lot of investment to work out
           | how it is built, how it works, what is useful about it.
           | 
           | Regarding caring if other people read my stuff, I would like
           | people who are interested in the same things as me to read it
           | or to introduce an idea I think has merit. But introducing
           | ideas properly requires exposition. So I need to follow my
           | own advice and create exposition for my thoughts for
           | consumption by others.
        
             | knorker wrote:
             | This is not about an attention economy. It's not about not
             | remembering your name or website. It's about there being no
             | way to follow you.
             | 
             | Your content needs to be maybe three orders of magnitude
             | better, to have the slightest chance of getting polled.
             | 
             | I would rather write a bot that scrapes your site and
             | creates an RSS feed, than poll it manually.
             | 
             | A blog without an RSS feed is like a restaurant 20km away
             | that's open one random hour a week. The food may be
             | amazing, but I'll never eat there. 167 times out of 168
             | visits it'll be closed.
             | 
             | So even trying to visit that restaurant sounds like
             | masochism.
             | 
             | If you write a blog, or open source, and hide it in a
             | basement behind a door labelled "beware of the leopard",
             | then it's just cause and effect that nobody will consume
             | it.
        
             | throw0101a wrote:
             | > _How do you find the good stuff without reading through
             | lots of stuff you don 't want?_
             | 
             | Finding and following are two different things.
             | 
             | I can find / stumble upon interesting sites in any number
             | of ways. But if I am interested, do you expect me to
             | remember your URL? To remember to regularly to type in a
             | URL and see if there are new posts?
             | 
             | I have NetNewsWire to inform me of new posts, so unless you
             | show up there, life is too short for manual checking.
        
       | BaculumMeumEst wrote:
       | what proportion of web traffic would you guess to be driven by
       | RSS rather than search engines or social media? even among tech
       | blogs?
        
       | Hackbraten wrote:
       | Every time I want to track some news source (or software release
       | list) and that source offers no RSS/Atom feed, I add that missing
       | feed myself.
       | 
       | For example, I wrote a feed generator that targets a specific
       | software package release page. It scrapes the page and converts
       | it to an Atom feed [1]. I then wrote a matching systemd service,
       | which triggers the scraper once a day [2] and writes it to a
       | file, no hosting required. My RSS reader is pointed to that file.
       | 
       | [1]: https://github.com/claui/release-feed-
       | mediola/blob/fca39e897...
       | 
       | [2]: https://github.com/claui/release-feed-
       | mediola/blob/fca39e897...
        
         | ulrischa wrote:
         | Read last week, that freshrss has a new scraping feature:
         | https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
        
         | remram wrote:
         | Fortunately Git tags are almost as good as RSS entries, it is
         | easy to get a list of versions from somebody as long as they
         | are creating tags in a Git repo.
         | 
         | There is not usually support in reader software though, so a
         | little scripting is still required, unless they use a Git
         | hosting platform that exposes those as RSS (GitHub and GitLab
         | do).
        
         | captn3m0 wrote:
         | These would be nice contributions to rss bridge.
        
         | Vinnl wrote:
         | I created [1]: you put a couple of CSS selectors into a config
         | file, push it up to GitHub, and then GitHub actions will run
         | twice a day to update the feed, and host it on GitHub Pages.
         | 
         | [1] https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/
        
           | gabereiser wrote:
           | oh this is really cool. It requires zero infrastructure on
           | the user's part (just a github repo) and does exactly what it
           | advertises. Great job. I'm going to start using this.
        
       | 45473wy wrote:
       | The only time I used RSS feeds was to automate torrenting.
        
       | nologic01 wrote:
       | > bloggers can provide partial RSS feeds that contain only
       | snippets
       | 
       | This plays well with federated microblogging (mastodon and
       | friends). RSS can play both the role of signaling that new
       | content is available and (if desired) providing that content. The
       | signaling aspect is more fundamental imho.
       | 
       | A user-centric web should aim to help people manage information
       | overflow without dependency on gatekeepers and their opaque and
       | manipulated algorithmic timelines. There is a certain catch-22
       | with supply (of RSS feeds) and demand (users with RSS readers).
       | 
       | The ideal would be that users could consume and share RSS feeds
       | with the lowest possible friction and highest possible privacy,
       | e.g. have feed readers integrated into the browser (live
       | bookmarks [1] sadly removed from firefox) or their email client
       | [2] (thunderbird offers this).
       | 
       | [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
       | 
       | [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-
       | feed...
        
       | Vanit wrote:
       | Literally the only reason I even read HN is because of RSS.
        
         | victorbjorklund wrote:
         | Why? How are you using RSS for HN?
        
           | 0xblaze wrote:
           | Check out below link to get more customized, topic wise rss
           | feeds.
           | 
           | https://hnrss.github.io/
        
           | stOneskull wrote:
           | protopage is a fine page
        
           | AndrewDucker wrote:
           | With https://news.ycombinator.com/rss through Feedly, for me.
        
       | lawn wrote:
       | Om that note, what are some good RSS readers?
       | 
       | Preferably a self-hosted aggregator and some Android app that can
       | sync with it.
        
         | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
         | I use a telegram bot @rss2tg_bot.
        
         | FredrikMeyer wrote:
         | I'm vert happy with miniflux. I have run it in a Docker
         | container on Digital Ocean for a few years.
        
           | ernesth wrote:
           | Also happy with miniflux. On android, I use Fluent Reader to
           | sync: https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader-lite/
        
             | toastal wrote:
             | I'm self-hosting Miniflux & use it in the browser or with
             | Newsboat. It's lacking a few features (namely the ability
             | to give multiple tags to feeds for organizing/consumption),
             | but ultimately it's low-bloat & good on resource usage.
        
       | scary-size wrote:
       | I'm not going to regularly read your blog if it doesn't have RSS.
       | Discovery happens here or on Reddit, after that it's RSS or bust.
       | On the plus side, I can't remember the last blog that didn't have
       | a feed.
       | 
       | For my main blog [1], I manually update the feed.xml, on my
       | ,,micro" blog [2] I have a cron job doing it.
       | 
       | [1] https://franz.hamburg
       | 
       | [2] https://atoms.franz.hamburg
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | rambambram wrote:
         | I like the idea of having two feeds. One blog for long form
         | articles, and one as a microblog (that I usually call a
         | timeline). This way, you have your own self-hosted twitter or
         | facebook-like timeline with short posts.
         | 
         | With Hey Homepage, I also built-in the RSS reader. I'm
         | following a lot of 'dev blogs' that I find here on HN. I'm now
         | in the process of curating an automatic newsletter for myself
         | out of all the feeds I follow (752 feeds and counting, although
         | I should remove some).
         | 
         | My dream goal is to make this more interactive. I would love to
         | be able to shoot simple messages to other websites and thank
         | them for their content or add something to the discussion (just
         | like happens on centralized HN here). If I for myself can get
         | rid of Big Tech as the middle man between my website and
         | others, I would be really happy. Right now, I use simple
         | comment forms under my post, but I soon found out what the
         | boundaries are for decentralized software like this. Still, I
         | think RSS has way more potential than it is used for nowadays.
        
         | rascul wrote:
         | > I'm not going to regularly read your blog if it doesn't have
         | RSS.
         | 
         | This goes for news sites as well. I used to subscribe to the
         | RSS feed of a local news site, for example. At some point they
         | turned it off. I haven't been back to that news site.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | > Back in the early days of blogging, the tech press bashed RSS
       | out of existence as it was supposedly too complex for ordinary
       | users.
       | 
       | I don't remember that being the case. The tech press probably had
       | various opinions on RSS. The ones I read were all fine with it,
       | if they mentioned it at all, but that could just be my bubble. At
       | any rate, what damaged RSS' adoption was not articles about it.
       | People not knowing how to use it definitely didn't help. Content
       | sources wanting to create walled gardens (how did that work out?)
       | hurt a lot. Google Reader going away hurt a lot too. Everybody
       | spending 100% of their time on Facebook or Twitter probably hurt
       | the most. But tech press articles, that's one I don't remember
       | being a major factor.
        
       | velcrovan wrote:
       | I wrote a rigorous Atom/RSS feed generating library in Racket:
       | Splitflap (https://joeldueck.com/what-about/splitflap/)
        
       | KronisLV wrote:
       | Being able to aggregate feeds in a consistent format is pretty
       | nice. That's more or less what let me create the Hacker News
       | Personal Blogs site: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/
       | 
       | It's thanks to the original HN thread where people linked their
       | blogs and then someone crawling them for RSS feeds to make an
       | OPML summary, I just get the posts daily now (after getting the
       | list of feeds from GitHub).
       | 
       | I actually wrote about some of the challenges of doing that on my
       | own blog, in the "Ever wanted to read thousands of tech blogs?
       | Now you can!" post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-
       | to-read-thousan...
        
       | verisimi wrote:
       | When it comes to the importance of RSS to me, it is moral, almost
       | spiritual. That might sound like I'm overstating it, but hear me
       | out.
       | 
       | There is lots of interesting content out there. For an individual
       | to develop themselves, they need free reign to information. RSS
       | allows and enables an individual's learning about reality (on the
       | web).
       | 
       | The reverse is mediated information. Corporations/governments
       | would rather steer you to where they want you to go - to the
       | sandboxed areas, the paddling pools of the internet. Many people
       | think the internet is just youtube, facebook, instagram and
       | twitter. These are social mediating platforms.
       | 
       | RSS is probably the most anarchic technological development of
       | the internet we have had. More important than crypto or mobile
       | phones. Continued unmediated access to the information you are
       | interested in, without being distracted is what every individual
       | should be striving for.
       | 
       | No wonder Google bent over backwards to try to kill it.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | I built a custom blog using Django the other day, and made some
       | detailed notes on how I did it since it's been a while since the
       | last time.
       | 
       | https://til.simonwillison.net/django/building-a-blog-in-djan...
       | 
       | Atom support was easy, thanks to Django's built-in syndication
       | library (a feature for over 18 years at this point
       | https://github.com/django/django/commit/944de9e9e638bc239b03...)
        
       | bob-09 wrote:
       | What's the federated version of an RSS/atom feed?
        
         | 0x073 wrote:
         | RSS is already the federated version. ??? Or did you mean
         | something like feedtree
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20130104173140/http://www.feedtr...
        
         | akho wrote:
         | What do you mean?
        
         | prmoustache wrote:
         | RSS is a one-way communication channel publisher -> reader
         | which isn't a context where the concept of federation make any
         | sense.
         | 
         | You can aggregate feeds, not federate them.
        
         | flagrant_taco wrote:
         | Why federate it? With RSS it can be individually hosted and
         | owned, adding a federation layer would actually make it more
         | centralized.
        
       | qudat wrote:
       | https://prose.sh for a hugo-like blog platform with built-in RSS
       | support.
       | 
       | Creating an account is as easy as SSH'ing into our content
       | management system: `ssh new@prose.sh` (no email necessary).
       | 
       | And publishing a blog is as easy as copying files to our server:
       | `scp hello-world.md <user>@prose.sh:/`
       | 
       | We also host an RSS-to-email service at https://feeds.sh using
       | the same tech.
        
         | stOneskull wrote:
         | > Simply upload your images alongside your markdown files and
         | then reference them from root `/`:
         | 
         | > ![profile pic](/profile.jpg)
         | 
         | if images are getting uploaded to imgs, how does referencing
         | them with root work? it doesn't seem to work for me. is it
         | supposed to show the pic?
        
           | qudat wrote:
           | Thanks for trying it out! It should work as-is, we hot-swap
           | the relative URL for imgs.sh
           | 
           | You can try dropping the file extension which will force the
           | service to use webp. If that doesn't work, you can email me
           | your user profile and I can dig in further.
        
       | Helmut10001 wrote:
       | Mkdocs [1], Hugo, Jekyll or 11ty.dev are the way to go for blogs
       | these days. All have RSS plugins.
       | 
       | [1]: https://du.nkel.dev/
        
         | oneshtein wrote:
         | Pandoc is much better when blog, pdf, and epub are goals.
        
           | toastal wrote:
           | And literally almost any other lightweight markup option will
           | be better suited too. Markdown doesn't support metadata,
           | details/summary, callouts/admonitions, image attributes,
           | citing quotations, definition lists, etc.
        
         | FireInsight wrote:
         | Astro is my personal favorite: https://astro.build/
         | 
         | It's like an SSG where you can write templates with modern
         | components frameworks, and write content in MD / MDX. No JS is
         | shipped by default, but you can opt in to it for interactivity.
         | 
         | There are many high-quality templates, but making your own
         | custom styling and layouts is easy, and you can write CSS in
         | whatever way you like.
         | 
         | MkDocs and Jekyll are more for docs in my opinion, but Hugo is
         | pretty good if you hate javascript.
         | 
         | I would recommend Astro over 11ty 100% of the time, though.
         | Both are JS, with slower build times etc than with Hugo, but
         | Astro integrates better with the rest of the ecosystem.
         | 
         | Gatsby has apparently fallen off a cliff, wouldn't even
         | consider it.
        
           | Helmut10001 wrote:
           | I looked at themes for 11ty.dev and astro and find that most
           | distract from the actual content and focus too much on
           | "boilerplate design". The examples for astro are mostly the
           | standard corporate-stuff-nice-slogans-but-no-content - if I
           | see such websites, I usually close tabs immediately.
           | 
           | mkdocs, on the other hand, is made with a 100% focus on
           | content, which is why I selected mkdocs for my blog. But
           | different users will have different needs and there are many
           | different blog types out there, so :thumbsup:
        
             | FireInsight wrote:
             | If you want the focus to be only content, you probably
             | don't need a template. Templates often try to be flashy,
             | but you can usually cut out the bloat. Some off-the-shelf
             | offerings might have more desirable results out of the box,
             | but I like Astro because I want to build the site myself.
        
               | Helmut10001 wrote:
               | Yes, I agree. There is still need for structure &
               | organization, here mkdocs hat superior extended Markdown
               | formatting Syntax (super fences, sane lists, code
               | highlights etc.), all of that makes fast reading and
               | filtering of content a lot easier. None of the other
               | static site generators come close for this part of
               | functionality.
               | 
               | Anyway, I completely understand your points, this is not
               | meant to be ranting at astro!
        
         | arcanemachiner wrote:
         | Gotta add 11ty to that list as well:
         | 
         | 11ty.dev
        
         | mythz wrote:
         | We're also maintaining a Free Blogging project template for C#
         | Devs preferring Razor Pages technology stack, which also
         | includes support for RSS by default.
         | 
         | Like Hugo it lets you create statically-rendered, CDN hostable
         | websites, but includes dedicated support for authoring and
         | publishing blogs, here's what the primary blog view looks like:
         | 
         | https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/blog
         | 
         | https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/feed.xml (RSS Feed)
         | 
         | Other generated views for exploring blog archives:
         | 
         | - https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/ (explore blog
         | archive)
         | 
         | - https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/author/lucy-bates
         | (by author)
         | 
         | - https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/tagged/dev (by tag)
         | 
         | And for those wanting a privacy alternative to Disqus and
         | Mailchimp, it can also integrate with CreatorKit [1] - a Free
         | OSS .NET App you can self-host to enable Comments on Blog Posts
         | including managing Newsletter mailing lists subscriptions which
         | includes support for generating and sending Monthly Newsletters
         | from new content added to your Razor SSG website - all features
         | we're also using to power our blog features [2].
         | 
         | [1] https://servicestack.net/creatorkit/
         | 
         | [2] https://servicestack.net/blog
        
       | langsoul-com wrote:
       | If superfans and economics was your aim, wouldn't email news
       | lists be better?
       | 
       | Got whatever reason, people would actually pay for a news list.
        
       | diimdeep wrote:
       | Why Firefox removed RSS support? It felt like betrayal of open
       | web.
        
         | toastal wrote:
         | I believe usage numbers were low, but it was likely most
         | beloved by power users, which is the same audience that
         | disables the telemetry & experiments as that trust has been
         | abused on more than one occassion in the past. SSB was removed
         | because it had low usage despite it being behind an
         | about:config flag.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | galleywest200 wrote:
       | I had to fork the Hugo theme I chose because the designer felt
       | that RSS was not important to link to, even though Hugo
       | automatically generates it each time you execute the command.
        
         | fouc wrote:
         | name and shame
        
       | throwaway154 wrote:
       | A blog post, saying blogs still need RSS, without a human
       | discoverable RSS feed.
       | 
       | I'd post a comment pointing this out, but a 'Discuss' link to a
       | 3rd party site, not part of the blog, remark.as tells me I need
       | to login to write.as
       | 
       | At this point I conclude the writer's failing to drink their own
       | coffee let alone eat any dog food.
        
         | zulln wrote:
         | > Topics I regularly blog about (append /feed/ to the uRL to
         | get the RSS feed)
         | 
         | https://journal.paoloamoroso.com/about
         | 
         | I think I agree with your overall point, but it is mentioned on
         | the site where to find the RSS feed.
        
         | pamoroso wrote:
         | I'm the author of the post and you're right. My blog is hosted
         | at Write.as, which doesn't make feeds auto-discoverable.
         | 
         | I'll definitely bring this feedback to the Write.as developer,
         | thanks. I also added a link to the RSS feed to the blog's About
         | page.
        
           | throwaway154 wrote:
           | That's stellar. It'll be sure to benefit others on the
           | platform.
        
       | damnesian wrote:
       | >RSS feeds make web scraping and content stealing easier. This is
       | a legitimate concern.
       | 
       | This is a negative way of looking at the reality- rarely
       | mentioned in articles about RSS: RSS may be "dead-" however,
       | there are many mobile apps that are fed by RSS feeds. Having one
       | may risk some loss of revenue- but you'll lose even more by
       | simply being omitted from these aggregator apps, all of which (i
       | mean, ok.. probably all) link back to the source website. That's
       | a huge potential for added exposure and revenue.
        
         | memefrog wrote:
         | > This is a legitimate concern.
         | 
         | This isn't even true. If you publish information on the web,
         | then people are going to download it to their computers. That's
         | the whole point of providing it. When someone accesses your
         | website, your web server _actively_ responds with the web page.
         | 
         | Complaining about people doing this is like complaining that
         | someone asked you for money and then you gave it to them. Yeah,
         | they asked, and you gave it to them? If you don't like it,
         | don't give it to them.
         | 
         | In other words, if you don't like people scraping your website,
         | _don 't give them your web pages when they ask for them_.
        
         | karaterobot wrote:
         | Does RSS make web scraping easier, or does it make it so you
         | can avoid doing web scraping altogether? Web scraping is hard
         | to stop, but if people just want to get the content, an RSS
         | feed probably uses less resources for everybody compared to web
         | scraping.
        
         | mikae1 wrote:
         | .
        
           | JimDabell wrote:
           | This would effectively remove you from search engine indexes
           | as well. To fix that, you would have to add that URL to
           | robots.txt, but any decent scraping tool would also pay
           | attention to that so you'd be back to square one.
        
             | mrd3v0 wrote:
             | You can probably find or pre-emptively exclude search
             | engine indicies IPs from the blocklist. It isn't like there
             | are more than a few out there, sadly.
        
             | mikae1 wrote:
             | .
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | Zuiii wrote:
         | I include RSS feeds specifically because I want make it easy
         | for website users to use my site, even for scrappers (and
         | independent search engines, and AI training, ..etc). The idea
         | of "stealing" content doesn't even make sense. How does one
         | even steal information.
         | 
         | People who think like this need to get over themselves.
        
           | lelanthran wrote:
           | > People who think like this need to get over themselves.
           | 
           | So it's fine if someone took the fruits of your labor and
           | sold it without permission?
        
           | nicbou wrote:
           | I live from my website. Stolen content uses my labour but
           | routes its fruits to someone else who adds no value. I'm
           | competing against copies of my own work.
           | 
           | Worst of all, the lazily copied versions of my work introduce
           | serious errors because the authors don't know what they're
           | talking about.
           | 
           | Oh and some copies are used for phishing scams, so that's
           | another concern.
        
             | davidcbc wrote:
             | It's incredibly common to only publish a headline and
             | summary to RSS and then have people click through to your
             | site for the full article, so it seems like you're blaming
             | RSS for what is a user error
        
               | toastal wrote:
               | This lessens the payload of the RSS as well not shipping
               | dozens of whole articles.
        
             | memefrog wrote:
             | >Stolen content uses my labour but routes its fruits to
             | someone else who adds no value.
             | 
             | This has nothing to do with "web scraping". Scraping means
             | downloading. What you are complaining about is copyright
             | infringement: they are downloading your web pages and re-
             | uploading them elsewhere. That's completely unrelated.
        
               | nicbou wrote:
               | They're the same. It's just a matter of whether a machine
               | or a human does the paraphrasing. With AI, the latter
               | will become very common.
        
               | memefrog wrote:
               | Downloading and uploading are not the same. 'Scraping' a
               | website is just what all of us do every day.
        
               | nicbou wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
             | pomstazlesa wrote:
             | I understand this issue and really feel sorry for anyone
             | who has to deal with this. I just don't understand how
             | explicitly not implementing RSS would even her with this
             | [not saying you specifically claim this]
        
               | nicbou wrote:
               | It enables machine-stealing. The sort where the whole
               | content gets copied and hosted on a content farm. This is
               | admittedly a smaller threat as those rank very poorly in
               | the search results. I was mainly answering directly to
               | the parent comment who doesn't understand why people
               | don't like their work to be stolen.
               | 
               | This is what stops me from open sourcing the whole
               | website, since it's just Markdown. It would be good to
               | open it up to contributions, but the website is already
               | copied enough as it is.
        
               | prmoustache wrote:
               | Having the web pages accessible publicly are what makes
               | machine stealing possible, rss has nothing to do with
               | that.
        
               | pomstazlesa wrote:
               | > It enables machine-stealing. The sort where the whole
               | content gets copied and hosted on a content farm.
               | 
               | I understand that but lack of RSS is not going to prevent
               | that. It's barely a roadblock for those who steal.
        
               | matheusmoreira wrote:
               | > It enables machine-stealing.
               | 
               | Publishing your website _at all_ does that. Feeds are not
               | at all required to scrape websites.
        
             | input_sh wrote:
             | My personal favourite: someone stealing a random post,
             | backdating it to a couple of days before I published it,
             | and then sending a DMCA to my hosting provider for my own
             | damn article.
        
               | nicbou wrote:
               | Does that happen? Hot damn. I never considered this
               | attack vector. It's brilliantly evil.
        
               | extra88 wrote:
               | That sounds made up but they don't need an RSS feed to do
               | that. RSS could actually help with your defense because
               | it means others could have a copy of your post from your
               | feed fetched before the liar's.
        
         | Finnucane wrote:
         | And it assumes you're blogging for money, which is not
         | universally the case. If you're not blogging for money, those
         | objections are of no value.
        
         | easeout wrote:
         | I don't get the argument at all. If someone is so averse to
         | publishing a feed of full article text, they can still publish
         | a feed of headlines, first paragraphs, and "read more." It's
         | tedious to read those but much better than no feed.
        
           | berkes wrote:
           | I actually like it when feeds have some sort of TLDR in their
           | feed body. It works as a quick way to determine if I want to
           | read the article or can skip it.
           | 
           | Fowler's blog does this (or maybe Feedly does?) but not many
           | others, afaik
        
             | berkes wrote:
             | Now that I think of it: that would a very nice use of an
             | LLM: some proxy where I put an RSS into, and that publishes
             | a modified RSS feed where the <description> is then
             | replaced with a very short summary of the original
             | description.
        
         | pamoroso wrote:
         | I'm the author of the linked post and I agree with both of you.
         | But this is an objection I got on an earlier draft of the post,
         | so I mentioned it.
        
         | ekianjo wrote:
         | If its in a rss its not called web scraping...
        
       | lagniappe wrote:
       | I built a tiny unopinionated static site generator that is great
       | for blogs. No toolchain or anything fancy, it has RSS support too
       | :) It would be my pleasure if someone wants to try it
       | https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw
        
         | mbork_pl wrote:
         | Same here: https://gitlab.com/mbork_mbork_pl/org-clive. A very
         | minimalistic, but more-or-less feature complete (though not yet
         | stable) blogging engine in under 400 lines of Elisp. Obviously,
         | it supports RSS.
        
         | mcdonje wrote:
         | Can't promise I'll give it a try, but I like the idea of a
         | static site generator that's little more than a markdown to
         | html converter.
         | 
         | BTW, I love the word 'lagniappe'. It really should be more
         | widely used.
        
           | lagniappe wrote:
           | Hey thanks, on both ;) not too often I come across people who
           | know about lagniappe
        
       | nicbou wrote:
       | My RSS feed is just a summary. This works well enough.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-19 23:02 UTC)