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Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading. Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don't miss anything. It's like putting a recording schedule in place for the shows you know you definitely want to catch rather than flicking through the channels hoping you land on something interesting. There's no rush with RSS -- you don't miss out on a day's worth of news, or TV recaps, or game reviews if you're offline for 24 hours. It's all waiting for you when you get back. And if you're on holiday and the unread article count starts to get scarily high, just hit the mark all as read button and you're back to a clean slate.
When Google News changed their web site format (and rendered it much, much less useful to me), I switched to using RSS feeds.
I had forgotten how awesome getting news this way is, and wonder why I ever stopped.
RSS feeds generally aren't infinite. If you're not online for 24 hours, depending on who's running the feed, you absolutely CAN miss out on stories. Most sites implement their RSS feed as a "most recent X items" and if there were more than X in however long you were offline - oops, they're just gone. You missed them.
Here, check out Slashdot's RSS feed and note that it only goes back a day. If you were offline for more than a day, you're going to miss out on whatever was before that. (Also note that Slashdot's RSS feed claims it's still published by Dice.)
Now you might use a third party service that constantly checks the RSS feed to keep it up to date, but the bottom line is that SOMETHING has to be online constantly to check the RSS feed or you might miss things. If you're using RSS because you don't want to miss anything, you're using it wrong.
I use Feedly to monitor around 100 RSS feeds. Every morning I peruse the headlines and read any stories of interest, the way people used to read the morning newspaper. There isn't really any reasonable alternative. Visiting all those individual sites and dealing with different layouts, scrolling, paging, etc. would be a nightmare.
Could someone recommend to me a newsreader that will integrate several news feeds into a single one? I do not want to use a web site that I have to log into. I just want an app or browser plugin. Thanks.
What's the practical benefit of "tracking news" supposed to be? News makes for poor entertainment. "Breaking" news tends to be inaccurate and the corrections usually don't rate headlines. It's also full of nonsense, like "someone said XYZ thing on twitter", or 50 different kinds of clickbait, or the latest dramatic semi-truthful story to troll the news consumers.
Conversations about the latest news are tedious. People just repeat the shit the newscasters and writers say, and most of them are repeating shit from other news. They all think very highly of themselves.
Unless you're tracking news for professional reasons, you're better off just reading it the next day on some web site. Or not reading it.
what i noticed recently is that almost every single site uses the choke point of feedburner for its rss feeds, and feedburner has started timing out all the time so I have to keep refreshing until it responds - this is annoying, especially when a site could generate it's own feed with a really SIMPLE bit of code
Not sure if anyone else has pointed out that RSS is decentralized (like the good old web 1.0 sites that serve it up), and therefore not subject to the whims of an editor like Facebook or Twitter.
The "logical" way to do it is treat news like a query-able database where one can filter to get what they want and only what they want. Whether that catches on with the general public is another matter.
Microsoft Outlook makes it relatively simple to set up filtering and folder-routing rules for email messages, yet some employees in typical work environments don't seem to "get it". Such people probably would not want RSS.
(As much as I lambaste Microsoft products, their email filtering & routing rule UI is fairly good in my opinion. Although, it arguably has too many options, covering relatively rare needs such as hooking up to junk MS is promoting but nobody wants.)
Table-ized A.I.
Sure, RSS is great for keeping up with your latest sites. Especially those low-volume sites that might publish an article every few months, and you forgot that it existed. But the real joy of reading by RSS is the lack of formatting. No more "read more" buttons, no more in-your-face javascript popup, no more loading 24 trackers. Just the article with photos.
In fact, I'm surprised that RSS hasn't been removed by the hipster designer crowd for being obsolete (because it's old, not because it's useless) and failing to track engagement or whatever. Frankly, I think they've forgotten that it's on their sites.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I am pretty sure that saying RSS feeds are more useful than facebook and twitter for tracking news, is not exactly a ringing endorsement
Far left? What are you talking about. The bias is for the establishment left, which tends to be economically center-right. They do tend to play up the identity politics side of thing to try and compensate, or to sabotage the actual left ("a.k.a.. those sexist 'Bernie bros'")
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Because RSS doesn't ask you for your email, address, credit card numbers, doesn't try and track you to the end of the world and doesn't resell your information and web browsing patterns.
RSS is an open standard that anyone can use, Facebook and Twitter are proprietary, closed commercial platforms controlled by a handful of entities including, I'm guessing, NSA/CIA/FBI/etc.
#DeleteFacebook
NEWS FLASH *** BREAKING
Google only offers freebies in order to aggregate a class of user information. As soon as they have that info, they either shut down the service or modify it and target a different class.
Why is this so hard for people to understand?
Why does anyone think they continue to offer services and then (once they succeed) shut them down.
At least they offer you a trade. You are - not yet - compelled to hand over all you data. Unlike the Credit Monitoring crooks who steal ALL your data and then allow it to be dumped on the dark web.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google don't want you to be in control and will likely be doing everything in their power to try to kill RSS.
I expect that they will sooner or later force web sites to make a choice between providing RSS feeds and being features on their sites. I also expect that those companies will try to portray direct reading of RSS feeds as being unsafe and exposing the reader to "fake news". Maybe they can even figure out legislation to make the provision and use of RSS feeds legally risky.
So, don't expect to be able to get RSS feeds for much longer: they are too democratic and too liberal (in the classical sense of "democratic" and "liberal").
I use TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/ . I have it setup on a small shared hosting plan I have with a Let's Encrypt SSL for security. I have a cron job that runs and checks for git updates and processing them updating it to the latest rolling release, as well as running every 5-10 minutes to check for new feeds. They have an AMAZING mobile app that even has offline support. Very handy when I was on a 5-hour flight the other day to download all feeds and stories and read later on the plane. If you have a shared hosting account available to you, this is the way. It has options for logins, even multiple users. The app will save your user/password if you'd like. This is also how I came and found this article. I used Feedly in the past but found TTS much easier to use and did not rely on ANY 3rd party services. After being burned by Google Reader, I felt this was a must.
My Yahoo has done this forever.
AOL Reader is another one, released just when Google Reader was killed off.
Kriston
$ sudo apt-get install rss2email
$ r2e new you@yourmail.com
$ r2e add feedname http://feed.url/somewhere.rss
$ r2e run
The last command should be put into your crontab.
Now you get new articles automatically delivered straight to your email. setup mail filters, or whatever you like.
Tip: craigslist has custom rss feeds for each search. So you can use rss2email to notify you of new posts matching your search.
RSS is simple. Decentralized. And if you don't have a RSS feed on your site, you don't exists (at least for me).
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
If anyone is looking for neat Linux news, techy stuff, or just weird, random research articles I find sometimes, follow my Twitter @TheOuterLinux. I probably got about 10-15 RSS feeds (and growing) I filter through; I made an RSS filter to Twitter script using rsstail and twidge.
Every time RSS comes up, I think, "Yeah, I should look into that." And then I poke around, and it seems like every one I find is a paid service. Are they all that way? Am I just looking in the wrong places? I am slightly interested in a push feed for some web sites that I follow which post erratically (a web comic here, a blog there) but it's just not worth paying cash for something, over, say, just loading the page in a browser once or twice a day.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I want to extract a timeline of specific events (in this case, the scheduling for corporate earnings announcements and conference calls) from some giant news feed like BusinessWire.
Is there a very easy way to do this?
I know it's not rocket science. I could write code to do it. But I like easy answers. Is there a super easy way to generate this data?
So I use Feedly (and Newsify on iOS), and it's pretty good. I went looking around recently, and most of the free options are legitimately terrible. They don't support OPML, or they're restricted in a way that's really obnoxious. I'm okay with good services trying to monetize, though, so it's not that big a deal. But if you're looking for something that's free, your options are thin on the ground.
Then when you get to clients, it's surprising how many fail on basic interface things, even when you're paying, particularly in the smartphone app space. I was considering Unread, a rather pretty iOS client. It looks like the reading experience is good and it can handle multiple different services...but you can't add a new source. So if you're on your phone or tablet, you have to go to your feed in a different app and add it there. That seems ridiculous.
Other apps just have terrible interfaces, or bizarrely seem set up so that reading is a bit of a chore. I've sifted through a lot of apps, and for free, the best you're going to get is 'pretty good' (Newsify). In the paid space, well, I haven't pulled the trigger on anything because $6-10 is a lot for an app that might make my life worse than it currently is now.
I humbly disagree. Facebook and Twitter are almost real-time as far as news goes. Facebook was the first to announce that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson passed away suddenly. This was on FB before any main stream media outlet. Also FB was the first to report that BLM formed a blockade and blocked relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey victims.
The left/right dichotomy is a fake one egged on by both the media and the main political parties. In the US, it's pretty much BS and worth ignoring completely.
And of course, apps like Apple News are just prettified RSS readers. It's harder to monetize and data-harvest though, so of naturally it is largely ignored.
From the article and blindly copied into the /. submission:
If you want to advocate for publicly specified formats without encumbrances, then have the spine to do that. That would be great work to do and should be celebrated for its own sake. But there's nothing about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which somehow grants any of the features being claimed above.
RSS is merely a feed format. What goes into that feed is up to the site that publishes the feed. Even if users are given control over their feed, that's merely a site function and this flexibility will differ from site to site. A site could publish an RSS feed which doesn't "catch everything a site publishes", a feed that contains "just the articles that have proved popular with other users [...] just the articles from today [or] just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter". There's nothing inherent in RSS that keeps you "in full control of what's in your feed". Users necessarily deal with a proper subset of what was ever published in a site's RSS feed. If most RSS feeds contain everything the site publishes and leave the user to decide what to include in their view of the feed, that's great, but that has nothing to do with the RSS XML vocabulary. The lack of clear distinction, conflating multiple issues, and giving credit to RSS for those benefits makes the benefit of RSS unclear and confusing to those who don't know what RSS is and read articles like this in hopes of learning.
Digital Citizen
Bubble effect is still there with RSS, because you only have the news from the sources you configured. But at least it does not reinforce itself, as an algorithm would push on you the news it decided you should like.
The combo that works well for me. I pay for the FeedHQ account, not much money and I use it daily so why not? Interfaces well with Reeder on OS X and iOS devices and keeps everything in sync. I didn't use Google Reader after getting burned by the Google Home Page shutdown so when it went away I didn't miss it.
What the summary said is true for the default Facebook news feed, but not for a Facebook list. You can add pages that you're subscribed to onto a Facebook list, and when you look at the list, it will show all posts from all of those pages in chronological order. Just keep scrolling down, and you'll see all the older posts from those pages.
I use Feedly to monitor around 100 RSS feeds. Every morning I peruse the headlines and read any stories of interest, the way people used to read the morning newspaper. There isn't really any reasonable alternative.....
There is a good alternative.
https://www.commafeed.com/
+ you can host on your own server
https://github.com/Athou/comma...
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Apparently somebody recently resurrected the old Yahoo Pipes system more or less
http://pipes.digital/
So you can do a lot of RSS feed merging/sorting/filtering using a drag and drop workflow editor like the old Yahoo Pipes.