I completely agree with this sentiment. Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging.<p>It always annoys me when sites request permissions to send me notifications - hey idiots, if I like your site I'll subscribe using your RSS feed and read at my pleasure. You don't have one? Bye then.<p>In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines. This used to be the case and then the winds changed and something was lost. I'll like to see it return.<p>Where I wrote my blog's static site generator, one of the first features was RSS[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://sheep.horse/rss.xml" rel="nofollow">https://sheep.horse/rss.xml</a>
Having struggled with RSS in the past, I will give a few reasons of why I ended up removing RSS from my blog:<p>1. RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing. Hardly anyone uses RSS any more as a daily reader^1.<p>2. Spammers were using my RSS feed to wholesale copy the content from my blog. Identical copies of my blog went up in several different locations, each with their own copy of ads from the scammers. Some of these blogs ranked higher than mine for certain search terms. Google would eventually catch on and remove them, but it was like playing whack a mole.<p>3. We did not make any money from the RSS feed. Even if we did find a way to monetize it (injecting ads into the feed, for example), see #1.<p>As a techie, yes yes yes I would like to have an RSS feed. But from a business standpoint, it doesn't make any sense these days.<p>^1: <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss%20feed" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...</a>
I tend to read my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where signal is non existent in the tunnels, and patchy in the stations. My app of choice (newsblur) lets you sync your feeds for offline browsing so I do this before heading home.<p>Unfortunately a lot of feeds I subscribe to tend to truncate their articles with a summary or maybe just the first paragraph, with a link to continue reading the full article.<p>I get why they do this, getting people onto the site gives a greater opportunity to show ads etc, sites gotta be funded somehow.<p>A few years ago I wrote a tool that ingests these truncated RSS feeds, visits each new link in the feed, and then uses a text extraction library to pull out the full text. These full text articles are then supplied as a brand new RSS feed for my client to subscribe to.<p>I felt really guilty about it though and wasn't sure about the legal implications of it
RSS seems to have died off as social networks decided that they wanted to capture the users and vertically integrate. RSS turns them into commodities, and that's the opposite of what they want.<p>Plus it's difficult to monetize an RSS feed.
Just as importantly, please add a meta tag that links to the RSS or Atom feed correctly so feed readers can discover it. Medium (which I hate and you should feel bad if you're using) <i>finally</i> added RSS feeds, but I still have to try and figure out what the hell they are every single time because they're not linked from anywhere and can't be discovered by my feed reader.
I don't subscribe to anything via any other means. No need to give any personal info; no risk of spam filtering; I can apply my own filters to content; everything in 1 place.<p>I've seen some site owner say it allows nefarious players to grab their content, post it as their own, and get it index by Google before they do. But that problem should be solved by Google, we should't cripple the web because of it.
Funny how RSS managed to take off originally by focusing on discoverability (education about meta tags, the infamous orange “broadcasting” icon, etc.) and these days it’s still plagued by lack of discoverability or misunderstandings as to its use and reach.<p>All the blogs/sites I ran/run/manage have RSS feeds, and I still sift through roughly a thousand items a day over breakfast using Reeder and Feedly. RSS is very far from dead - it’s just not a common enough use case to be the default way for non-technical (or, rather, “non-motivated”) people to read their news and other info.<p>When you have the motivation and interest in following specific topics or sites, it’s not that much of a landing curve to pick out an aggregator (Feedly seems to be the most popular).<p>I’d say that RSS is in extensive use by humans, and that most shortcomings in comments up to now have fairly trivial workarounds (like truncated feeds, which can trivially be worked around by a client like Reeder, which can fetch the original homepage and render it in a format similar to “reading mode”).<p>In general, I think RSS has tremendous return if you a) pick your sources carefully and b) spend a bit of time figuring out how to get a good UX.
Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have become the new RSS readers for the masses. I get it, having an open distributed web would be a great thing but that ship has sailed, walled gardens are the new web for 99% of internet users. If your blog post is interesting enough to get picked up and shared via social networks, people will see it in their feed and hop over to view your post.<p>After someone has finished scrolling down their Facebook, Twitter and reddit feeds, they’re ready to start that loop all over again. There isn’t a place in most peoples mental bandwidth for adding an RSS reader to that mix. And I was a heavy consumer of RSS via Google Reader and then Feedly when GR was axed. This post just reminded me that when I got a new phone I never even bothered to install Feedly again. Totally off my radar at this point, and if that’s the case, there’s no way someone less geeky than me is going to start picking it up.
I follow many blogs, many of them of individual developers and if you're not on Wordpress or Medium (ugh), then the next common choice is a static website generator like Jekyll or equivalent.<p>Some of them don't have RSS feeds.<p>But I just contact them privately and kindly ask them to add an RSS feed.<p>Most of my requests had positive results, since you just need to integrate a plugin [1] or copy a pre-made atom.xml template, like one of my own [2] but any one will do.<p>Of course you can go down a rabbit whole in optimizing the CSS, like I usually do, until I decide that a freaking summary of those articles is enough in the RSS feed and be done with it. But that's totally optional.<p>And if you're doing it manually, don't forget to add a meta tag in the <head> of all your pages, like:<p><pre><code> <link rel="alternate" href="/atom.xml" title="Atom feed" type="application/atom+xml">
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/monix/monix.io/blob/master/blog/atom.xml</a>
Kind of ironic because I can't find any RSS feed linked on this site (apart from in the blog post itself). Not even my RSS reader picks up that he even has a RSS feed. Bit odd to be commenting on others not having RSS on their site if his own site doesn't properly support it either.
If you use Hugo, here's how to add an RSS link to your site. Just add the following to your <head> area in your template(s):<p><pre><code> {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "rss" -}}
{{ printf `<link rel="%s" type="%s" href="%s" title="%s" />` .Rel .MediaType.Type .Permalink $.Site.Title | safeHTML }}
{{ end -}}
</code></pre>
Related link: <a href="https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout" rel="nofollow">https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#readout</a>
Widespread RSS support is crucial to pushing the open web forward and allowing the ecosystem to compete with mainstream social networks.<p>RSS isn’t perfect and can be fairly technical but the majority of the issues with it can be mitigated with tooling.<p>Regular people can use RSS; Podcasts have proven this. One thing feeds don’t have is an ITunes style directory.<p>I run Pine.blog, a Twitter-like, easy to use Feed Reader for iOS and the web that’s trying do do exactly these things: make Feeds easy to consume and discover so the open web can flourish.<p>Pine.blog has a free feed directory that helps users discover new sites and feeds to follow. The directory is human curated and moderated and it has an API for other developers to use for free (as well as a paid version for commercial applications).<p>Feedback always welcome!<p>Feed Reader
<a href="https://pine.blog" rel="nofollow">https://pine.blog</a><p>Feed Directory
<a href="https://pine.blog/search" rel="nofollow">https://pine.blog/search</a>
I've never really understood how one is supposed to use RSS.<p>Do authors include the whole article in the RSS article "body" or only a glimpse? I think I've seen both things and don't know what to do. Are readers expected to read the article in the RSS reader itself or open it in a web browser?<p>I've read a couple of tutorials and tried to use it, but I never quite understood it, and I didn't like any of the clients I tried.
I think the worse RSS isn't in not having RSS, it's when they say "Hey here's a preview of what we wrote."<p>I really enjoy reading content on my terms on not having to go everywhere to get it. It makes my life much more peaceful.
I don't get why everyone here is complaining about RSS dying. It still exists. Almost every blog platform and news/content website publishes RSS feeds. There are some great apps for reading feeds on desktop and mobile (including features like offline syncing). There are a bunch of RSS add-ons for Chrome and Firefox. Slack natively supports piping feeds into a channel. You can even build RSS workflows with Zapier or IFTTT.<p>Yes it isn't the hottest thing in the tech world today, but it doesn't have to be.
Easy enough to support this article; RSS is good for the open web and relatively trivial to support: took me maybe an hour for my personal blog, compared to the enormous effort I've put into CSS and formatting for the website proper. I'd love to get a feeling for how many folks here have a blog with RSS support and what the relative level of traffic is between RSS and other forms of traffic. Does anyone have statistics they'd care to share?
> But I was surprised to learn that many of the blogs that Jan had linked to didn't support RSS.<p>I went through them all, and of the 32 only two didn’t provide a feed[1]. Not all of them linked to it on the page, but Reeder[2] found them with ease from the home URL.<p>Funny enough, the feed for blog of the linked post was hard to find — Reeder didn’t catch it, and from a quick glance on the blog’s home I found no reference to it. If I didn’t think it odd that the author wasn’t providing a feed, I wouldn’t have found it.<p>Blog platforms tend to provide support for RSS feeds because blog platforms are built by people who care about such things, so even if the writer doesn’t care, the feed will be there. I’m more worried about the lack of RSS support in big popular platforms that have no reason to not provide one, such as the News page on the Epic Games Store[3].<p>[1]: It may be that some were auto-generated and provided wrong info; I didn’t verify them in depth.<p>[2]: <a href="https://www.reederapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reederapp.com/</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news" rel="nofollow">https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news</a>
Sites don't offer RSS because<p>- they are developed by hipsters who were in elementary school when RSS was in its heyday and don't know what it is.<p>- sites operators want to human users to interact with their site specifically, and not be able to skim the highlights through a remote interface. They want users to view all of the content (including advertizing) in its fully rendered form, and not some clipped version that has been commoditized and aggregated.<p>Basically RSS is a form of voluntary self-scraping. Through a modern perspective, RSS looks like "robots will scrape the site anyway, so why not do it yourself and offer the scrape as XML". Webmasters today deal with issues such as, for instance, Google clipping their content and incorporating it into search results, so that users do not "click through" to the site. When you offer RSS, you're basically doing sort of the same thing to yourself.<p>But, of course, RSS is great for end-users, just like a Google result that has the condensed info right there.
RSS can be used for more than traditional blogs, too.<p>The CII Best Practices badge has a "projects" page that lists all projects working on or achieving a badge: <a href="https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects" rel="nofollow">https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects</a> . You'll notice an RSS symbol; if you click on it, you'll be led to <a href="https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed" rel="nofollow">https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/feed</a> (in your preferred language) that will show you projects listed in reverse-latest-edit order (so you can see who's made the latest changes to their badge info).<p>Once you start thinking of RSS as a way to tell people "what's new" in a simple common format, there are lots of interesting uses for it.
I run a SAAS for forwarding email addresses in order to protect email addresses by handing out individualised burner addresses that you can block if people start to abuse them with uninvited mail.<p>For a weekend project, I added some functionality to publish the blocked emails as an RSS feed - and now I think it's one of the best features of my service.<p>I use a separate address for things like linkedin, facebook, twitter, steam, github etc. and I turned on the email notifications. Then I blocked those addresses and subscribe to them as RSS feeds instead. Now I can read that stuff during my normal RSS reading flow instead of having it end up in my inbox.<p>There's a link in my bio to the service if you want to check it out (not sure about HN rules about recommending my own service). Yes, you can use your own domain to avoid being locked in to my service.
Speaking of RSS feed links, shame on Apple for hijacking feed links on iOS. They open Apple News but just generate a dialog that says "This content is not available on Apple News"
I love RSS so much. I use inoreader but there are many free RSS readers available (like feedly). I don't subscribe to anything via any other means - RSS completely covers my daily news needs. Please keep it alive!
Curiosity question, will most modern RSS-readers be able to find an RSS link on their own, or is it a good idea for me to include a link on a homepage that users can copy-paste?<p>I've never advertised any of my rss feeds, I just leave them up at <domain>/rss.xml. I was under the impression that RSS feed locations were mostly standardized, but I'm noticing that the feed location for this blog is at a different URL.
I stopped using RSS when Google Reader went away, but I don't really miss it. I just use HN instead, which is like a curated list of the best stuff and I don't have to already know it exists and be subscribed to an RSS feed.<p>I suppose if someone made something that summarized a bunch of stuff in an RSS feed or somehow prioritized for me, maybe I'd use that instead.
Instead of just reacting to the instantly agreeable title, out of curiousity I read the blog post and checked the blogroll the author cites as the cause for him to comment on adding RSS support.<p>It lists 33 blogs. However, out of 33, only 2 of them lack an RSS feed. cdevn and mikebabb. Neither has much content.
Are we talking about RSS <i>specifically</i> or a syndication feed <i>generally</i> (i.e., "RSS" proverbially)?<p>Would Atom and JSON Feed be the best two to implement?<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed</a>
Just the other day I wrote an RSS (well, Atom) feed generator for my site in Racket: <a href="https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f" rel="nofollow">https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f</a>
I am surprised when people keep saying here that RSS is dead. I am using it more than ever, every site (including hn news) configured by topic in Inoreader. I even have reddit feeds within it via inline reddit. This way I can see my read/unread counts and mark favorites. I can also quickly export my feeds. It works cross device and it's the only source I use for news, articles or anything else I read on web. If site doesn't have RSS that's shame and I probably never visit it again.
For a small competition when I was 14, I worked on a hand rolled CMS system in PHP, MySQL. I remember trying to determine what RSS was and Atom, what it all meant. I thought it was cool and a handy feature I could hook into that little RSS app I found on Kubuntu.<p>Didn't win the competition, but expanded it over a few years and kept using it as my main blog until it fell aside when I went to university.<p>But unfortunately since the death of Google Reader, RSS hasn't found a way back into my life.
RSS feeds are designed for an offline first usecase. Almost no one subscribes to this usecase anymore since mobile internet is just REALLY good MOST of the time.<p>When it isn't - subway rides, long commutes passing through areas with weak signals - i just listen to podcasts instead of the frustration of reading an article and not being able to search anything instantly.
I'm using RSS feeds daily (even for HN), so it was a no-brainer to add RSS support to my blog as well. I've also created Tip of the Day [1] - while the daily tips can be accessed via an HTML site, I have written it mainly with RSS in mind.<p>[1] <a href="https://tips.darekkay.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tips.darekkay.com/</a>
If your main concern is people scrapping your blog or only reading the RSS without visiting it directly, at least put the first paragraph in the feed. I prefer seeing the whole article, but at least having a preview let me decide if I want to keep reading, and it let me knows something new came out.
Totally! It makes content so easy to track. I try to use Twitter a little bit for this, but most accounts post lots of other tweets in addition to "new post", so I have to spend time trying to guess which hashtags they might use to denote actual posts.<p>Separately, I really like JSONFeed <a href="https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed" rel="nofollow">https://jsonfeed.org/2017/05/17/announcing_json_feed</a>. It's the same idea as RSS, but in JSON instead of XML. I find it a much easier format to work with and I really wish JSON as a feed structure had caught on more.
RSS is dead... long since dead. There are a myriad of reasons why it died.<p>1. People don't want you to use RSS. They want you to visit their site so they make money from ads.<p>2. Only a small percentage of users care about RSS.<p>3. DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. The RSS feed often breaks an no one really knows about it.<p>Source: Me... I was one of the inventors of RSS and run an feed SaaS platform which only has sunset support for RSS<p><a href="http://www.datastreamer.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datastreamer.io/</a>
I've been dabbling on an RSS feed reader of my own for a while now, which sorts all posts by their published date. Do you know how I can get the people over at Hacker Noon to add a <pubDate> element to their RSS feed? I'v tried here: <a href="https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/10965" rel="nofollow">https://community.hackernoon.com/t/rss-doesnt-have-pubdate/1...</a>
Funny story. Most blogs I follow via my Reeder [0] ( actually best app I've ever used for (i|mac)OS ... no, I'm not affiliated with the app ) are ones that end up on HN. It's funny but my RSS feed currently is 30% HN / 30% Media websites like The Guardian / 40% Other. Since a year or two I rarely add new sources to my feed, which I feel it's sad.<p>0: <a href="https://reederapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://reederapp.com</a>
Absolutely agree, RSS feeds help save so much time for end-users, and makes contextual skimming much easier in one place.<p>* <i>Shameless plug</i> *: Our little service, Feedity - <a href="https://feedity.com" rel="nofollow">https://feedity.com</a>, helps create RSS feeds for any public webpage, even JS/XHR/SPAs, and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), via a visual feed builder and REST API.
RSS and IRC I think have that timeless quality that may mean that it will not die
out, and hopefully have perennial resurgences. Not just the irritation of FB style
notifications and dark patterns, but also speed and uniform customisation play a
role. Why let FB guess what I want to see if I <i>know</i> which I need to see to be ha
ppy/productive/nonnarcissist?
I use RSS for everything I do on the internet: news, other websites, subreddits, craigslist, hn, even journal articles.<p>On pubmed, you can generate an rss feed from any boolean search string you want (some of mine are for journals, authors, or keywords). It spits out the abstracts and I can skim over hundreds of articles in not that much time and keep track of colleagues.
If you want to contribute to help create a consumer-grade RSS reading experience: <a href="https://github.com/getstream/winds" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/getstream/winds</a><p>I think part of the problem is that there are no RSS readers that try to appeal to a mainstream user audience. They are all tailored to power users.
Please add h-feed to your site: <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed" rel="nofollow">http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed</a><p>And you can get free RSS, Atom, JSONFeed, ActivityStreams from that via <a href="https://granary.io/?input=html" rel="nofollow">https://granary.io/?input=html</a>
Looking at the blogroll he's talking aboit, I counted :
9 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery + link pointing to the RSS feed
20 blogs with RSS Autodiscovery only
3 blogs with link to the RSS feed
4 blogs with nothing (including it's own blog)<p>RSS link+autodiscovery would be so cool on every blog!
I was looking for a feed for the broadcaster Arte's website and found <a href="https://rssbridge.net/" rel="nofollow">https://rssbridge.net/</a> which has 'bridges' for a large number of sites. Can be self-hosted too.
My lousy one never let it go. RSS is a protocol, not something that depends on Web readers, browser extensions, native app, whatever.<p>Each one should use whatever they feel like, and I never understood the drama around Google's reader.
How do you sell an RSS feed addition to a profit-only minded manager?<p>How can they make money by paying me to do something that allows their customers to read their articles without advertisements spliced all throughout them as they demand?
I made a thing that sends an email when a list on the internet changes <a href="https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zvakanaka/list-lemur</a>
RSS is literally how I get my news from the web. We should be making useage and protocal better for the modern concerns of power consumption (bandwidth usage), delivery and user discovery.
I stopped using Facebook and other social networks in favor of reading more blogs and write on mine. I installed a new RSS feed and I enjoy it quite a lot.
just like RSS should be there for latest articles, sitemaps should also be there for collection of all articles on the blog. So that we are not at the mercy of crawlers to get list of all articles of a blog.
It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest ever success-story in web-publishing, WordPress, reached early popularity because it had first-class support oob for two formats that declined a few years later: XHTML and RSS.