'RSS Has Already Won' (brianschrader.com)

Brian Schrader, an independent software developer, writes: It's been a little over 5 years since Google Reader shut down and the world of RSS readers was tossed into the junk drawer of collective memory. But, looking back on it today, I'd actually argue that RSS and Feeds as a whole never really disappeared, only the Feed Readers did. In building Pine, and as a long time Feed Reader user, I've been pleasantly surprised over these last 5 years to see that most sites still have RSS feeds. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't support them, but YouTube, Reddit, Squarespace, Wordpress and so many more do by default. Feeds of all kinds still exist, nearly forgotten, in the markup of most websites, and this means that Feed Readers can, and will, make a comeback someday. The foundations are already laid; the hard work is done. RSS Feeds became a standard, and were built into the tools we use to make the web today. It's almost as if we laid the tracks and built the trains for a trans-continental railroad, but we've just forgotten how to sell tickets.

Comments

Still lots of Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this post via a RSS Feed reader.

Re:Still lots of Readers

[caseih]

Same here. I think the feedly Android app is a bit cumbersome (what's up with page at a time scrolling?), but it does the job. I track Slashdot, Ars, various forums, and world news sites using Feedly and RSS. Love it.

A while back I asked the forum administrators on a forum I frequent if they could enable the RSS feed, which they did. I view that feed every day. Beats the heck out of using the web interface and trying to track activity on several sub forums.

Re: It's a foundation, not a competition.

[phantomfive]

Mainly I don't mind missing stuff

YouTube support is at best reluctant.

[pots]

YouTube does, technically, support RSS feeds, but you have to know the secret handshake in order to get the feed address. Saying that feeds are "supported by default" is a little over-optimistic. Google does everything short of completely banning feeds in order to get you to stop using them and sign up with their tracking service instead.

For the secret handshake, use either:

"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[your channel ID here, alphanumeric string]"
or
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=[username here, but the username is not always the display name. Check page source.]"

and copy that address to your RSS reader.

Self-host TT-RSS

[cerberusss]

I think lots of people here have some server running somewhere. Install Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) on there, and be able to access it from anywhere. Totally open source. https://tt-rss.org/

What's great is that there are a number of RSS reading apps that you can point to your server, so it doesn't matter whether you're on mobile or on your desktop browser. For Android, I'd suggest just use the app from the same author. For iOS, I use Tiny Reader (App Store link).