[HN Gopher] Blog Feeds
___________________________________________________________________
Blog Feeds
Author : stevedsimkins
Score : 219 points
Date : 2025-10-04 19:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogfeeds.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogfeeds.net)
| leakycap wrote:
| Social media is easy, yet users commonly need help because they
| simply can't manage a login/password... I don't think this DIY
| approach is simple enough to get traction
|
| I could see a service where you paste in a URL of anything you
| find interesting, then that service going around and finding an
| RSS feed or newsletter signup and doing it for them... maybe
| taking off
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Or, as we call it, a "Follow" button.
| leakycap wrote:
| Who is "we"?
|
| Whoever "we" is doesn't seem to see the distinction between
| what is being described here & above and a follow button.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| This could be done using RSS and feed:// uri scheme if it
| was more popular.
|
| https://notes.zachmanson.com/feed-uri-scheme/
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| I'm working on something similar, rather than finding an RSS
| feed it simply finds blog posts (or personal site pages) that
| are similar to your query. Probably a next iteration would be
| to create RSS feeds from the dataset.
| bwilliams wrote:
| > The best part about blog feeds? It's just an idea. There's no
| central authority. There's no platform.
|
| I think this is blessing _and_ a curse. I had an idea that I
| built a while back that centralizes RSS feeds so you get the
| centralized benefits of social media while authors can own and
| control their own content.
|
| If anyone's curious, I built it out here: https://onread.io but I
| never had the time to really share it out or push it beyond the
| SUPER basic MVP that it currently is. I was thinking about
| pivoting it more into a tool that I could turn into an RSS feed
| for myself, but I haven't found the time, really.
|
| Either way, I don't think RSS feeds as-is are as useful as they
| once were, and social media still has significant value over
| feeds due to conversation, sharing of content to folks with
| similar taste and interests, etc.
| esseph wrote:
| I'd argue RSS more relevant and mostly void of the abuse of
| other systems and platforms.
|
| The social component is exactly the problem for many.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| This is sort of what Substack is! It is a proprietary platform,
| but on the other hand i don't think most of us will get around to
| making a blog.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Please replace social media
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I wish it mentioned WebMentions in the comment section.
| clueless wrote:
| if you think this will work, you haven't fully understood why the
| likes of twitter has become successful, i.e. centrally controlled
| collaborative filtering, amongst others aspect
| colesantiago wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| You're more likely to get discovered if your content is on a
| centralised platform than a decentralised one.
|
| RSS alone doesn't cut it and you cannot know if anyone is
| reading your content on RSS as there are no interactions or
| anything.
|
| It feels like this 'solution' is written by someone who just
| like the 'tech' of RSS and blogs.
| lapcat wrote:
| The reason social media is so popular is that most social media
| users have nothing interesting to say, so the only way they can
| get anyone's attention online is to intrude into other people's
| replies. They couldn't write a blog post if their life depended
| on it.
| kh_hk wrote:
| I write on my blog, but I am not sure who I am writing for. Which
| is fine, because in the end I write for myself. Years ago you
| would get comments, posts would get linked (remember pingbacks?).
| Maybe as time progressed I started writing more niche things that
| reach nobody, or maybe that web started disintegrating. Hope it
| comes back, but I will not hold my breath. I will keep posting
| though.
| firefoxd wrote:
| Some people have been following my blog for over 10 years. The
| only reason I know is because someone decided to email me on a
| random Tuesday. You'd be surprised what you find when you look
| through your logs.
| AlexAplin wrote:
| Some of the major hosted feed readers (Inoreader, Feedly,
| Feedbin) include subscriber count in their user agent. I
| usually run a filter on requests to the feed links in my access
| logs to get an idea of how they're changing. Anecdotally, my
| subcriber count reaches into triple digits with only those
| counts, but I've never gotten email from readers and generally
| only get feedback promoting new posts on socials. The counts
| are about as nebulous as follower counts, which is to say most
| people probably subscribe/follow and forget.
| stared wrote:
| Though, it kind of works that you keep adding blogs and blogs,
| until it turns out that RSS feed is mess. Maybe no clickbaits or
| ads, but still density of posts I want to read goes down.
|
| Do you know any good solution, where there is collaborative
| filtering or RSS (bonus points for open, tweakable algorithm) +
| some AI with _custom_ prompt to give me top recommendations?
|
| Something where I am in the charge of the algorithm, not the
| other way around.
| chrisamiller wrote:
| I don't mean this to sound snarky, but if a blog doesn't have a
| good ratio of signal to noise, you just unsubscribe from the
| feed.
|
| The solution is to be okay with missing some things instead of
| trying to drink from the firehose.
| stared wrote:
| Maybe it is one way to go.
|
| But I had a similar though with newspapers. There are quite a
| few I like. Yet, there are more articles in one that I can
| read - especially when I want to have other sources as well.
| So yeah, if there were only a handful of good blogs, it would
| be the case. But there is a long tail of interesting stuff
| there.
|
| Anyway, even for the Hacker News, I would like to filter a
| bit, so to have feed like the hackernewsletter (which I like
| a lot), but profiled more to my tastes.
| esseph wrote:
| This is like taking responsibility then claiming you don't
| really want it.
| not--felix wrote:
| I am thiking of adding an algorithm to my reader, but I am
| still not sure how. For collaborative filtering you need a lot
| of user to have enough data on small niche blogs.
| pedalpete wrote:
| The problem with blog feeds is the action required by the user to
| decide what blogs to follow, and then the desire to go to a
| different app to read them.
|
| But this strikes me as a problem that can be solved, and
| potentially already has been.
|
| If I go to a newsreeder the first time, it's empty. I have to
| decide what to follow.
|
| If you can get me to add a few blogs of interest, you start
| understanding what I want to read.
|
| I can then subscribe and follow, just like I would on twitter,
| and you can present new stuff to me, so I'm never showing up
| without something new.
|
| I suspect this is something like what substack is doing, but that
| means all the blogs have to be on substack.
|
| I never go to substack to browse, I go there when a link sends me
| there.
|
| If there was a service that I as a blog-writer can submit my feed
| to, and that service is managing the promotion of my blog to the
| right readers, that would be a benefit, and I wouldn't feel
| locked in.
|
| I'm sure this has been done, why did it fail?
| esseph wrote:
| I'm just speaking for myself here...
|
| The last thing I want is another service with an algorithm.
|
| RSS by itself is devoid of that, which is an appealing feature.
|
| Does everything have to be a fucking product?????
| pedalpete wrote:
| Nobody is telling you that you have to use it.
|
| How do you overcome the discoverability problem with RSS.
|
| It isn't a "product", it's a solution to a problem.
| esseph wrote:
| I still don't know what the problem is you're complaining
| about.
|
| I find things I like, I add them to RSS reader. I don't
| have thousands or hundreds of things in there, maybe a few
| dozen.
|
| "Make it easy for users to find things" - if they can find
| a website, they can find an RSS feed. I'm sure any LLM with
| Deep Research would be great for that.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "I find things I like" is the discoverabity problem right
| there. Where do you find them?
| esseph wrote:
| They're all websites. We've spent decades building search
| engines that index and categorize these. Mostly though
| they are just news websites, aggregators, friends, or
| friends of friends. I'm not searching to solve a problem,
| per say, just things I may enjoy reading about if I have
| time.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev is the closest
| variant I know. You can see who else subscribes to feeds that
| you follow, and see what other feeds they like. The current
| version doesn't have a recommendation engine, but you could
| easily build your own.
|
| > so I'm never showing up without something new.
|
| I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it
| with endless content would make it less valuable to me.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Yeah, there is a delicate balance between endless content and
| "hey, this is probably valuable to you".
|
| Maybe you could even set "I only want to see a maximum of 5
| new posts a day" or something like that.
|
| I wonder with the right incentives if this could be run as a
| distributed open-source service.
| mustaphah wrote:
| > RSS is actually already familiar to you if you have ever
| subscribed to a newsletter [...]
|
| RSS is far better than a (digest) newsletter; you can browse
| individual posts at your own pace, keep some unread for later,
| and revisit them across sessions.
|
| With newsletters, you either read the whole thing in one sitting
| or leave the email unarchived forever.
|
| If only every newsletter had an RSS feed. But of course they
| don't - can't show you ads!
| sameline wrote:
| https://kill-the-newsletter.com is a great way to turn email
| newsletters into RSS.
| mustaphah wrote:
| Nice tool. Thanks for sharing!
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| That's a great way to promote blog discovery. And fairly hands-
| off.
| silcoon wrote:
| I thought about a similar problems because I always find really
| interesting blogs (mostly on HN) but I don't have a real place to
| store them, so they get lost when I close the tab. I can save
| them in the favorites but I'm not used to check favorites
| regularly.
|
| Feeds are a tangent solution because they give you only the new
| stuff. Feeds transform blogs into social media platforms where
| what matter is the new fresh content, ready to "feed" the
| algorithm. But blogs and personal sites are different. High
| quality content is usually written in a single article, maybe in
| the past, and it will not be shown on your feed.
|
| Actually I judge a blog on what's already written in there, so I
| want to read more articles but maybe just not right now. If I add
| the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future content.
|
| Another patch to this problem is Instapaper. I can save there the
| most interesting articles and read them later, but the entire-
| blog view is missing.
|
| I would like to have a way (platform) where I can save a blog and
| read all/some articles, with a standard formatting (custom blogs
| are nice but not always comfortable to read) and not having a
| default sorting for recent articles.
| nicbou wrote:
| Instapaper and Feedly work for me. Instapaper is the main thing
| and Feedly a thing I check occasionally for the blogs I love.
| a10c wrote:
| i've tried a paid Instapaper plan a few times but always end
| up leaving because their reader view very regularly misses
| entire sections of articles
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Try Readwise Reader
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > If I add the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future
| content.
|
| Why? All the old articles are there as well.
| ghilston wrote:
| I've tried a few solutions and have landed on just storing them
| in an unordered list in a markdown file
| azinman2 wrote:
| I sometimes use reeder but its UI isn't quite right for me. But
| there'a a fair amount of options out there.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| I have the same issue, the chronological nature of feeds kind
| of breaks this flow. It feels like there's a missing piece,
| like a standard to browse older content from a blog. I Wrote a
| bit about this here: https://olano.dev/blog/web-anthologists/
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Why not just bookmark it in your web browser? Or create a
| Tumblr blog and make a new post for every cool article you
| find. You can set and edit the tags later if you want for
| searchability.
| ekhaliul wrote:
| I am using a self-hosted instance of https://linkding.link/
| which works great for hoarding a bunch of links. I am using
| multiple machines and different browsers and keeping bookmarks
| on the cloud is just not my thing.
| edfig wrote:
| I use FreshRSS, self hosted, and it lets you set and fetch x
| amount of old articles. I think I've got it set to 25 but 5 if
| the default.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| What year was this written?
|
| All for people doing their own sites/blogs. But social media is
| the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts
| that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the
| content you've published wherever. And the reposting of other
| curated favorites is the extra feed portion. The change in recent
| years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and
| posting directly on the social media sites because they were
| convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging
| users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from
| using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to
| the POS part.
| johanyc wrote:
| > What year was this written?
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250801000000*/https://blogfeed...
|
| Looks like recently in 2025
| _zeta wrote:
| I use my blog to mainly write about stuff I do that I really
| don't want to forget about, like interesting vulnerabilities I
| found or projects I want to share, reach is ~30k visits/month
| (still no idea how since I think it's kinda niche) but so far is
| working.
|
| I consider it also a good way to force myself to keep thoughts in
| order and to do a recap on the activities I do that most of the
| time are very chaotic.
|
| I would probably consider integrating messages also to receive
| feedbacks.
|
| I use hugo with the backend hosted on GitHub Pages, so far is a
| pretty solid setup that requires minimal effort since I just
| wrote an action to build pages every time a commit is done on the
| main branch
|
| In case you are interested: https://appsec.space
| not--felix wrote:
| I do not think RSS can replace social media, but we need more
| blogs where people just "reblog" thinks they liked, it would
| really help with discovering new feeds.
| m-hodges wrote:
| I don't have any analytics or social trackers on my blog, so I
| usually don't know if anyone is really reading it; but
| occasionally someone will email me in reaction to a post and
| that's usually quite nice.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's so nice and personal, unlike a social media notification.
| It feels like having a pen pal.
| re wrote:
| > The idea is to create another page on your blog that has all
| the RSS feeds you're subscribed to. By keeping this public and
| always up to date, someone can visit your page, find someone new
| and follow them. Perhaps that person also has a feeds page, and
| the cycle continues until there is a natural and organic network
| of people all sharing with each other. So if you have a blog,
| consider making a feeds page and sharing it! If your RSS reader
| supports OPML file exports and imports, perhaps you can share
| that file as well to make it easier to share your feeds.
|
| This is usually called a "blogroll", which has the advantage of
| being much less ambiguous/overloaded than "feeds".
| samesense wrote:
| I had a very similar idea. I'm glad someone implemented it.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| And even better, there used to be a concept of "pingback", back
| before it was just abused by spammers, where you could connect
| blog posts together (the OG "react" medium) through a ping
| mechanism that was at least in Wordpress, not sure about other
| platforms.
|
| But I found a ton of great blogs just scanning through other
| people's blogrolls.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| My recollection from that era is that sadly it was
| immediately abused
| riffraff wrote:
| An interesting development of modern blogging is you can
| integrate the fediverse pretty easily, e.g. WordPress can
| trivially publish ActivityPub and you can receive replies,
| likes, and boosts from mastodon et al.
|
| I Imagine the risk of spam is the same as for pingbacks, but
| at the moment this doesn't seem to be the case yet.
| onli wrote:
| WordPress still has those, or are they disabled by now for
| new blogs? I get them from WordPress blogs sometimes instead
| of the nicer trackbacks, same thing without xmlrpc.
| Webmentions are an orthogonal newer system, basically
| incompatible trackbacks.
|
| Serendipity implements all three now, so there are definitely
| still blog engines that support these mechanisms.
| hopelite wrote:
| New internet rule: When the name of a service/software is a
| common word in any language that already has a meaning, we
| must escape it if the context is lacking that would
| indicate it's title property.
|
| Examples: /Serendipity, /Sheets, /News /Numbers, /Files,
| /Drive, /Translate, /Play, etc.
|
| Exceptions: If the context is clear, i.e., in a text
| talking about Google assets where News, Sheets, Drive,
| Play, are mentioned; or one prefixes the context with "The
| software Serendipity...".
|
| We should not assume everyone in the world knows every
| single title of every single software and service.
| onli wrote:
| Well, context. We are talking CMS or blog engines, and
| "blogengine Serendipity" does find it as first at first
| place, so does "cms serendipity". But for the log, I was
| talking about https://docs.s9y.org/.
| soapdog wrote:
| WebMentions are the evolutions of pingbacks and they're a bit
| more powerful.
|
| https://indieweb.org/Webmention
| soapdog wrote:
| I made two webextensions that can discover blogrolls:
|
| https://andregarzia.com/2024/05/feed-and-blogrolls-discovery...
|
| Also https://blogcat.org has the same feature but is a full
| blog reader.
|
| It is cool to surface blogrolls like that.
| p5v wrote:
| We have a very similar feature on https://feedle.world. Every
| search has its own dedicated RSS feed that can new followed
| directly, as well as an iframe that can be embedded on other
| people's websites. This way, anyone can build accidental
| blogrolls, based o topics of interest.
|
| P.S. for people whore not really into RSS, we are also Beta
| testing the option to subscribe to searches and get results in
| email digests. Same idea, but you don't need to bother finding
| an RSS reader.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Love it. Here's my "Blog feed":
| https://www.contraption.co/blogroll/
| mikepk wrote:
| This is a little triggering :) Reminds me of all the promise back
| in 2005 when I built my first startup Grazr. It was: - a widget
| that was a mini RSS reader that let visitors to your site read
| the RSS feeds you subscribed to on your site - a way to share
| your collection of RSS feeds dynamically - a way to copy / remix
| those collections - a way to subscribe to those lists dynamically
| (if they had a dynamic blogroll or whatever) - a processing and
| filtering engine to allow merging collections of feeds together
| into a single stream - Javascript on the server (in 2005 :) ) run
| using embedded script tags in the OPML / XML blogrolls to create
| even more dynamic blogs
|
| The net effect was you could make your own news feeds / timelines
| and use code to control how they were filtered / combined /
| etc... It was crazy powerful (for 2005) and I still miss it
| _today_ since it had the dynamism of the news feed, some of the
| social aspect, and total control since there was no algorithm
| other than your and the people's who's list you subscribed to
| curation and any code you ran against it.
|
| Not a lot left from those long ago days but I did find one
| slightly-cringy video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45DSrU23sPI
|
| :)
| colesantiago wrote:
| > What about monetization?
|
| > You certainly can try to find ways to monetize through
| platforms like Substack, it's truly up to you. The key is
| building a network of people who want to talk together!
|
| Hmm. This is one of the reasons why this won't take off unless
| the blog is on Substack and people are making money out of it.
|
| But then again power laws are brutal, which is why Substack has
| got good discovery, ordinary wordpress/ghost/jekyll/ssg websites
| and blogs with RSS don't.
|
| There needs to be a way to gate web / RSS content +
| discoverability behind hit for those who don't want to go onto
| Substack, especially now with AI crawlers scraping blog content
| from authors for free.
|
| Otherwise the only way to make money from your writing would be
| to use Substack.
| jurakovic wrote:
| Here is my feed: https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs
|
| And here is my "rss reader": https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-
| links/news/ :)
|
| Although I myself don't have a blog, for past few months I think
| about starting a new one. We'll see.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Wasn't the idea of Yahoo! Pipes[1] the aggregration of RSS feeds?
| It actually did that and did a really good job of it. I would
| prefer something visual like Yahoo! Pipes for aggregating RSS
| feeds - everything else is just another list...
|
| Then we could all share our pipes and build better ones on top of
| existing pipes. The thing with Pipes was that you could also
| filter feeds and use Pipes as feeds for other pipes ... Yahoo!
| Pipes was a great product that was _way ahead_ of its time.
|
| If anyone is interested in actually replicating this, then I
| would suggest using Node-RED[2] as a stand-in for Pipes.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
|
| [2]: https://nodered.org
| onli wrote:
| Maybe also have a look at my https://www.pipes.digital/ if you
| want that :) Filtering and merging RSS feeds is the main use
| case, and I made sure to have some features to enable building
| on top of other pipes (a prominent fork button for shared pipes
| and a pipe block).
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Great stuff :) That's exactly what I meant :thumbsup:
|
| I actually found www.pipes.digital in my mind map with a
| comment to the effect that it's a Yahoo! pipes replacement -
| so I come across it a year ago in fact.
|
| I'm sticking to Node-RED simply because that's what I know -
| also its open source and very extendable, so that's why its
| my cup of tea.
|
| EDIT: Pipes is also open source --> https://github.com/pipes-
| digital/pipes --> sorry didn't see that.
| onli wrote:
| Great that you found the Foss version :) I hesitated there
| because it needs an update, and node-red is great and
| easier to extended. So if you are already familiar with it
| a great choice.
| Anaminus wrote:
| I was going to ask, is there a standard for this sort of thing?
| Then I realized that it's just references in the form of text.
| Hypertext, if you will. We should make a markup language for it.
| Velocifyer wrote:
| This pretends Atom feeds don't exist.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-05 23:01 UTC)