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'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.
I found this post via a RSS Feed reader.
Isnt twitter and facebook 50% rss reader? Everything you "want" to read is neatly organized
I'm betting on a gopher comeback.
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"? Regardless, I've never stopped relying on them. I have several readers on my Android phone, and use Thunderbird on desktops to collect feeds for review alongside e-mail, which seems perfectly natural to me.
I read all my news off them. Cuts out all the cruft.
Its not dead.... perhaps not well publicized, but not dead...
-beaker
For me at least, if a website doesn't have an RSS feed, I'm not likely to frequent it. My RSS reader is how I interact with a large amount of the web. I honestly can't fathom how people can use the internet without one. It's so mentally taxing and you miss so much stuff.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Idiot plugging his lame-ass RSS reader, which is named the same as a famous mail client? Looks like another clueless "developer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)
My crotch has an RSS feed. Every time I bust a nut, it's published to the feed.
amazingly your feed always updates 27 seconds after pornhub.com/gayanalsex/ uploads a new video. coincidence? i think not.
I don't know about you but I personally love RSS. Have 14 sites that add new articles daily (this place included), go to one page scroll through what has been added, don't need to refresh or look to see if any of them would have updated. Basically I can pretty easily keep up with reddit, Slashdot, and random other news sites. Plus the places that barely update once a week or so I don't have to check them, but since I'm checking my feed anyway I see their new posts right away.
Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.
I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.
Until you reminded everyone it existed. Quick, to marquee up the internet.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The my.yahoo.com feeds disappear and reappear all the time. It's especially annoying because they're controlled by Yahoo.
Kriston
I assumed it (Google Reader, and thus RSS) was killed deliberately by Larry Page.
I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.
RSS is dead?
Actually, Feedly + Twitter + a well-curated list of bookmarks is all I need to inhabit my Internet bubble.
I do kind of miss Usenet, though.
Fiat Lux.
Sorry, I'm pretty attentive and mindful enough to know when to check regularly for updates.
RSS served no useful role for me, so it lost from day one.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Easy and simple, no one can't compete with the simplest a fastest solution, even Facebook had to disable support for it as it couldn't control how it was competing with its own product, and the liberty it provides to free information; Another Beta vs VHS, but this time with Beta(rss) being the royalty free solution.
As it has no limits for control the info, the big ones doesn't support it because they just couldn't release products to compete with its own rss implementations.
That said, for almost the last 20 years no news has reached to me if it was not through a RSS reader as it has been the only way to control what was readed or not, and synchronize that all over all my devices; fb a tw r for newies or social adicts with lostsa time to loosse.
you can't beat what's in other dimension... (*spolier*)
here ends what some neis
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.
Slashdot users like to bag on CMSes, but one of the many benefits is syndication. Drupal, for example, makes it trivial to create RSS feeds of your content, and also has a good syndication module for pulling in entries from other sites' feeds. My cute little hobbyist site has RSS for this reason, and I have subscribers... Probably just because it was so easy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.
Get pornhub and the like to use em!
(disclaimer, I haven't checked to see if they have one already, and wouldn't surprise me)
That's why you use Feedburner, or whatever the modern equivalent is.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I still get my news via RSS.
Simple, really. If a site doesn't support it, I don't support them.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"?
Ever hear anyone talk about ATOM feeds anymore?
Yaz
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).
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Was just a blatant move to kill it off to get people to use G+ / FB / Twitter so our every engagement can be tracked and sold to the advertisers (and possibly nation-states).
RSS "lost" like Obi-wan lost in Episode IV. It was never really gone.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Why would I use anything other than an RSS feed reader to view RSS? Why do browsers need to support *all* protocols and interaction models?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Ditto for blink
Fascists.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The Vienna RSS reader is still be ing supported and it works very nicely on macOS
12 years ago, I wrote a website that took RSS feeds checked the posts where on topic, sorted to output into new web pages and RSS feeds, was even open to the public to create new feeds, and search (via google API) for feeds on subject. I a million page view per month, but the views where mostly for the output feeds, so no ad revenue. Run it for seven years, but got tide of paying £110 per month for hosting and getting on £12 per month from google Adwords, so I had to shut down, then the server died.
I use active bookmarks all the time, even for this. RSS is cool
Despite the Great RSS Wars back in the days when excessive blogging was the hip thing to do I still think that RSS is a killer concept and bound for a big revival when things get too badly out of hand with social media. Blogging is basically social media by and for the masses and with RSS and some other formats it could replace everything Facebook and Instagram have to offer in a heartbeat. I somewhat expect that to happen sometime in the future.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
RSS is a standardised XML format for publishing lists of articles.
That's pretty much it.
Its strength is that it is standardised, so if you build a reader for the RSS on one site, you've built a reader for the RSS on almost every other site. An RSS reader has the advantage over a web browser that you don't have to wade through all the crud of advertising etc to find the articles. They'll be listed in whatever order you like in a nice list view. The reader can also maintain state so it can flag articles you haven't read yet and it will give you a list of all the site RSS feeds and how many unread articles are in each one.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Feeds are great but they don't align with the business models of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, et al. A feed is something outside of their control, their algorithms, their aggregation. These days if you want to use feeds you have to get an extension to do it. I use Feedbro in Firefox which is quite nice for this purpose.
As a nerd, one thing that has really annoyed me is the lack of support for scientific notation on the web. Even 30 years after the invention of the web there is no good way to put scientific notation on a web page. Now we do have the MathJax JavaScript librar, but it is not a standard. It requires a special web server installation procedure, or if you are hosting on a service you have to use the external MathJax service creating an external site dependency, and the browser has to enable JavaScript. This is a PITA, not a standard mark-up.
The really odd thing about this is that the WWW was invented at a physics lab by a physicist. If Tim Berners-Lee had only made an a "latex" (or just "tex") tag a required part of HTML, rendering the standard scientific equation markup already in use, things would have been so much easier.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I would argue that the only place RSS has ever not really sank in is on the consumer side. Everywhere else, we use it all the time, for a lot of things. We use it for spidering, we use it for mapping, we use it for passing news between one website and another. It's incredibly handy, and part of the plumbing of the web. Yeah, we're using JSON services a lot these days for a lot of things, but not this. Not really. Might even be a fair argument that RSS and it's handy nature actually leads to it being pervasive, or even over-used. It's not dead. It never went anywhere.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The OP is a retard. So google killed their crappy RSS reader. They killed the READER, they did not kill all and every fucking RSS feed on the internet. There are other readers out there, even fucking MS Outlook can do RSS feeds. I never bothered with their reader anyway, I just used outlook - not my preferred method, but it works. RSS has been out for a LOOOOONG time, I even wrote my own reader once, just for shits and giggles, which is what I use at home. Trying to infer that "google killed RSS" is just fucking stupid, and shows a complete lack of knowledge on the subject.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I think it's more in use than he thinks, but ... taking him at his premise, I'm not sure that "nobody uses it but it's available vestigially most places" is really "winning" ...
I found this post using theoldreader.com.
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, or 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.
Gopher. Pah. Been keeping my 110-baud acoustic coupler on the shelf waiting for telephones and BBSs to make their inevitable march back to the front lines. My ASR-33 is ready to print, and my Baudot teletype is standing in ready backup with an ASCII-to-Baudot converted attached.
Real soon now!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<< ... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by JS because the 'experience' requires total compliance and continual browser obsolescence. RSS is just giving it away.
Ironically this comes on the heels of bandwidth and compression techniques that really could have blown us away with triple-to-ten-throughput back in the slow modem and PPP turnaround delay days. I mean, we could have been swimming in text like the Matrix! Instead of the Matrix's goofy nonsense KanjiGreekWhatsits dribbling down from the top of the screen,
IMAGINE a whole generation of children who might have had grown up NOT with the thumb twaddling tile-scrolley Instagram twiddle-screen tiny web page mush and over-resolution JPGs... but with an actual Matrix style of text presentation. They might have learned to read multiple streams in parallel (up/down or lleft/right) with crisp bright text illuminated in the same ANSI color palette that Jesus used.
And when these ANSI text character sprites began to float in a 3D field, now you're talking. Things could recede in Z with axis-flopping ... and the same kids who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds could keep a mental position within a virtual space, one that would NOT disappear when some WEBFUCK decides it's time for everyone to upgrade ... it would be a style/presentation uniquely their own, that would evolve as an extension of their mind. Instead of this HYPER-LITERATE possible Universe we now have,
Look Ma! It's a rectangle with a talking head! Let's watch it and listen to what it has to say... even though I can read three times as quickly.
AND OF COURSE I'm only generalizing on method when I talk ANSI (though I'm serious about the reduced color palette). By all means make this Matrix-style text sprite environment support Unicode and the world's scripts and symbols. And expandable tiles that represent visual zoomable image and video -- but my rub is those tiles MUST reduce to the size of characters so they join the text stream, not disrupt it. And if you clamor for EMOJIs that's backwards and stupid. Emojis are tools of Big Brother, who's just waiting in the wings for people to express themselves in pictorial symbols so Big Brother can change the symbols overnight.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
All those people repeating the template response about how JSON somehow replaced RSS are full of crap.
I used to use standalone RSS readers, but keeping work and home separate became a bit tricky. Then browsers incorporated it, and I started using the RSS support in portable Opera. There were always web-based RSS readers, but they were rarely very mature, until Google Reader raised the pair. When Google Reader died, there was a collective scream, but Feedly, Ino Reader, and others stepped up to the plate, and I don't see any indication that they will be stopping any time soon.
Used FeedBin ever since Google shut down their free service, and Reeder on my Phone.
These days I no longer need a Twitter client to follow people, even Twitter searches. Just add them as a feed. The great thing about it is it's cached and separated into separate feeds for me. So much easier than any Twitter client.