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Digg Reader To Shut Down This Month -- Latest RSS Service To Bite the Dust (betanews.com)
Digg announced this week that it's shutting down Digg Reader, an app which allows users to follow RSS feeds from sites. From a report: Following the closure of Google Reader, RSS fans flocked to the likes of Feedly, The Old Reader, Digg Reader and Inoreader. Now Digg Reader has announced that it is to close, and users are being advised to export their feeds so they can be imported into an alternative service. Users do not have a great deal of time to grab their data and take it elsewhere. The RSS reader is due to close on March 26, meaning there's less than two weeks to go. No reason has been given for the closure, but presumably the venture either didn't prove as popular as expected, or it was rather more costly to run than anticipated.
I mostly use it to view a collection of articles from various sources, and comics from various sources. Instead of having to visit each and every site and keeping track of which articles I have read and not read an RSS reader does that for me.
Visiting one link I can view all the slashdot tech articles, lifehacker, dilbert comics, commitstrip, etc. There may be other ways to emulate this on social media platforms but the fact I can pick and choose exactly what I want to read makes it so much easier to keep track of exactly what I want.
The problem: Where is the ad revenue in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I heavily use RSS. It's what brought this article to my attention. I currently use TT-RSS with about 60 or so RSS feeds subscribed. I like it because it gives me one spot to see all of the articles that have been published on sites that I frequent without having to go there. I can quickly scan the title and the summary (when provided) to see if I want to read it. Using TT-RSS I can quickly "star" articles to read later when I get a chance or just ignore ones that aren't interesting. I even use it to follow some Twitter feeds with my RSS reader so I don't have to use that service. I just think it's easier to have something aggregate the news for me. Push emails from sites end up being interpreted as SPAM to my brain, and manually going to 60 sites to see whats new is just arduous.
Be Excellent To Each Other
Tried it, hated it. What I wanted was a RSS reader that was smart enough to use regular expressions / follow the damn links to the content, but instead got something which was half-email / half-webbrowser.
For instance, there are, perhaps, several dozen webcomics that use RSS; Dilbert might publish the actual image inside the RSS feed, while Slightly Damned might include a link to their latest webcomic; in either case, it's annoying -> I want to be able to tell the RSS reader to grab ONLY the images (from wherever), and to display it all like on the cartoon pages of a newspaper (back when we had those; use a grid layout or something).
Same things with major stories: I want paragraphs...the reader I was using would give it to you in a line, like email -> I want the headline + a customizable amount of text following that, ala a newspaper.
Instead it just became unnecessary work. Reuter's homepage had things more properly organized than I could make them in the reader. As for the comics, I hate having to read a post, to find a link, that says that you have the latest up on your website (so take me there)...it's an unnecessary amount of clicking.
the protocol did not catch on, you're a geek using a niche tech that is dying.
move on, the rest of us have
What did you move on to, exactly? RSS is still everywhere, by the way.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I've been using Feedly for quite a while now. I originally was a Google Reader user, but that was shuttered a long time ago. Anyway, I have been mostly happy with the free version of Feedly, except that recently they've started injecting "fake" articles in my various feeds, presumably as a source of ad revenue. So, a couple weeks ago I finally got fed up and decided to see what other free readers there were out there. Digg Reader seems to be the best of the bunch, so I exported/imported my feeds and gave it a whirl. The user interface was not quite as nice, but at least there weren't fake articles to skip over. Then, yesterday I got the message about it going away on the 26th. Sigh
I suppose I could try the pay version of Feedly and ditch the ads, but for some reason, an RSS reader isn't worth 1/2 of the monthly price of Netflix to me (that's just an example). I suppose it's only "pennies a day" but a penny saved is a penny earned, as they say.
- Mike
It brings the content (or at least the first few paragraphs or so) of all my news sites into one place, without any ads.
People who manually click open 20 sites to read them are not geeks. end of.
Precisely. RSS lets me monitor the content of 33 websites that I frequently find interesting content on a real-time basis in a single small window, rather than having to have 33 tabs open constantly refreshing them. And as you pointed out, it provides a quick-to-read, easily digestible summary to decide to read the full article or not, with a non-visualized simple user experience. RSS is made for information addicts.
DaveyJJ
Something like 90% of my browsing gets done through RSS. I'm happily subscribed to INOreader, in the hopes that it will stay alive for a long time. Here is how I use RSS. On one page, I get the following notifications, bundled into the appropriate folders:
* All of my mainstream news from a half dozen different websites, with a headline and 1-2 sentence intro. This allows me to decide which ones are worth reading, and which ones to skip. It is super quick to get through a lot of news this way, and I avoid going to all of the different websites, their shitastic auto-playing videos, poorly laid out pages, etc.
* All of my web comics. About 2/3 display right in the reader, the other 1/3 I have to go to. But all in one folder, so no bookmarking, opening in tabs, etc.
* The limited social media feeds I follow, both Twitter and Facebook. Just the posts from the creators, none of the reposts, retweets, replies, or any of that shit. It's a minimal way to keep up with asshats who insist on using social media. (Hello local brewery, which only posts their taplist and hours on facebook...)
* Stupid shit that I keep around for when I need some lowbrow entertainment. Cat memes and failure gifs.
* STEM websites posting content I may or may not be interested in. The posts build up in that folder until I'm feeling sciency, then I can browse through a bunch of different fields and some of the new stuff coming out.
Having all of that in one place limits the mental energy it takes to track down all those disparate things. When I want to read my comics, pop open the comic folder, and I can read a couple of weeks of comics. When I want science, I can do that with science. I don't have to bookmark a thousand pages and open them in different tabs, and try to figure out how long it's been since I've been there.
Most places do a crappy job with archives. RSS lets me save and favorite things for later. And unread things are all in date order, so when I get around to it, I have an idea how old it is.
Trying to take in most modern websites is brain-fuzzing. Graphics and moving shit, boxes of articles, teasers and the like, infinite scrolling, etc. Every one is different, and they all suck. RSS gives me every website in the same format. Small image, title, couple of sentences.
Scrolling past a headline and it's marked as read. Unless I unmark it. And if I go to long and have 500 unread articles, I can just mark ones older than X days, weeks, months as read. It really simplifies how one interacts with content on the web. It's just so easy and organized. I really can't be bothered to do the web without RSS.
Oh, and INOreader has a great mobile app too, so I have the same thing on my browser as on my phone.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I was dependent on Google Reader for the daily news (including Slashdot).
When it shutdown, I did not want to go to yet another online service that can shutdown, so I opted for a self hosted solution.
First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.
One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.
So I switched to the original MiniFlux reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, and other databases.
The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2, which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionated!'
Using Go is an odd choice here, since this is not an application that has to be super fast. The slowest parts will be retrieving feeds (limited by the speed of the network and servers that host the feeds), or reading the database. Moreover, being a single executable, it does not integrate with your existing Apache or Nginx (if you already have them and want to use existing SSL certificates, ...etc.) and therefore has to run on a different port. PostgreSQL only is higher maintenance than MySQL, and if I don't not run PostgreSQL already, then I will not install, configure and maintain PostgreSQL just for the this one application.
So for now, the original MiniFlux does the job adequately, running behind SSL and password protected, so not much chance for a vulnerability getting exploited. Tiny Tiny RSS had a better user interface, but you get used to MiniFlux quickly. It even uses short cut keys that are like vim (j, k, ...)
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I think if you mainly only visit a handful of sites regularly then RSS doesn't have much value. If you're one of those people that bounces between Slashdot, Reddit, Hackaday and CNN (or whatever news you prefer). Then RSS is not worth setting up.
If you're like me and you track 40 blogs that are only periodically updated, then RSS is a real time saver. (the blogs are related to my hobbies, not anything news worthy).
As for how someone monetizes it? I don't care. I'm from the era when nearly everything on the Internet was free and advertisements were nearly unheard of. Use cases that may inhibit the full commercialization of the Internet is not something I worry about. We know the Internet can exist with or without ad revenue, people will always find a way to make it work. I accept that the Internet is bigger and better because of ad revenue, but I'm not going to bend over backwards and inconvenience myself in support of that commercialization.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I don't know about peaked, but about 90% of the news sites and blogs I go to have RSS. I get 500+ articles a day from about 100 feeds. For sites which only use Twitter inoreader incorporates them into the feed.
The same as every other service - injected into the feed as an article or inline with another article.
Oh, you mean using analytics to spy on whether I actually read an article or not? Yeah RSS isn't so good for that.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
https://newsblur.com/ Yes is costs a small amount of money but it works well. I have no other relation than being an early and still happy customer.
Bonus, because it costs money instead of selling ads, you're the actual customer and not a product being sold to someone else.
Also a customer, with 165 feeds, including Slashdot.