RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

RSS has been alive this whole time. Blogs usually have it by default, the big news organizations have it.<p>The only thing I&#x27;m not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There&#x27;s nearly 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper, which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy, in an RSS reader, every head line has the same salience, and it&#x27;s a pain to weed out what&#x27;s important.<p>I kinda hope news organizations would make a separate &quot;weekly digest feed&quot;, 30 or so articles per week.

All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.

Want to start a subthread here on what makes it great and despite many attempts to kill it, it still rocks! My take<p>1. Widely adopted protocol, clients in all programming languages.<p>2. Publicly readable without password<p>3. Get notification for new items in many tools like Slack<p>4. Easy to produce and consume<p>5. Many nice Web UI Reader available<p>&lt;Add yours&gt;

Don&#x27;t call it a comeback!<p>There&#x27;s still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom. As one of the folks involved in creating Atom I&#x27;m frustrated with the outcome.<p>These days it&#x27;d probably be JSON, right?

&gt; You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox<p>You could also just get the unique email address of a channel and let the email notifications go there, same result: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;206819278-Send-emails-to-Slack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;206819278-Send-emails-to-Sla...</a>

I know XMPP is not as popular these days, but there is an XMPP extension for pushing Atom stanzas as a sort of the push complement to RSS.<p>… and using Slack to consolidate RSS turns RSS from pull to push. (Slack probably has caching mechanisms across all workspaces to reduce pull bandwith).

Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do do polling, what interval?

Funny seeing this pop-up on my #hacker-news slack channel that periodically polls for the top stories :)<p>I actually prefer the ability to push things like the top stories of the day to me through either Slack on email rather than having the temptation to constantly refresh an RSS feed app. An added bonus is that I frequently add some custom logic to curate the feed to my liking (based on the feed).

I&#x27;ve been using Blogtrottr to email me my RSS feeds for whatever I&#x27;m following. It&#x27;s run without any hiccups in I think over 10 years. I have tons of feeds just emailing me every day and I skim through them and read whatever I find interesting. It&#x27;s really awesome, much better for me than anything else.

That reminds me of a project we did years ago for a large Dutch public transit company. We built an app with push notifications, and sometimes they needed to do big announcements to all users. We made our push notification back-end poll an RSS feed from their CMS every minute or so, if there was a new one on there it would get broadcast to all users.<p>It... wasn&#x27;t ideal though, in hindsight we should&#x27;ve hacked together a UI so that the people sending the message could confirm the message and see how many people would be receiving it first. There have been a few Incidents of accidental test messages sent out. One was my fault, early on, because production and test were the same machine. The other was the operators&#x27; fault, but by then the app had two million installations and it caused a bit of a social media storm that day (#hajo).<p>It was funny to see that one play out, and how quickly there are print companies making and advertising merchandise about whatever is trending on twitter that day.

The email filter you never check is now a Slack channel you&#x27;ve muted.

Never underestimate the resilience of &quot;low&quot; tech. Rule of least power still holds true.<p>Prior HN discussions: Turn GitHub into an RSS Reader (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27010144" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27010144</a>)

Honestly, this has been one of the hidden gems that gets so many people to stick with our service Murmel (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;murmel.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;murmel.social</a>). We support RSS feeds everywhere.<p>It wasn&#x27;t long before people discovered that and began using our service to deliver relevant stories to their Slack teams and stakeholders. As the author says, RSS is the closest thing to an open MVP-style API that &quot;just works,&quot; and hasn&#x27;t been plagued by a company&#x27;s closed garden rules.<p>I am wondering, what else could one use RSS for.<p>Long live RSS!

I loved blogs, I loved the vibe (like newsletters today) and I loved RSS (way better than email for receiving information. IN fact I am creating a project, and It will have updates by RSS. Why? Because I f**ing love it.

Maybe of interest: Even Youtube has RSS for channels. If your RSS reader does not pick up the relevant tag, the URL is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;videos.xml?channel_id=$ID" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;videos.xml?channel_id=$ID</a> with $ID starting with `UC`, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsASqbceBmQMi1WA39g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;feeds&#x2F;videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsA...</a> for &quot;ARTE.tv documentaries&quot;.

I think what really and significantly curbed RSS usage what Google reducing effective tooling (allowing you to see&#x2F;subscribe to RSS in the browser) combined with killing Google Reader. Of course by that time, half my feeds were just links to the full URL (ads and all). Then, they take the next step and introduce AMP, which is really cool in a way, but effectively makes Google the gateway to it all, and Google Ads especially.<p>Google makes ad revenue, cuts out most of the sites themselves and increases google value, while reducing the value of the actual site producing the content.

If you&#x27;re already using Slack to consume information asynchronously, this might be an OK fit.<p>I would advise against co-mingling an RSS feed with your team&#x27;s main communication or coordination channels.

&gt; RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows.<p>Isn&#x27;t Feedburner part of Google nowadays? I remember reading somewhere that they inject ads in the feeds.

&gt; You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox<p>I feel like Slack has already become a black hole equal to my Inbox in all respects and am hopeful that the Interoffice Mail envelope will stage a comeback for the things I really need to see.

RSS never seems to work on Windows. Funny when it is so simple. I did not realize this before. A simple client that fetches a feed, parses it, and searches the content for a keyword took me ~25 minutes to implement.

A timely observation. I’ve just been setting up the &#x2F;feed command for ops notifications in a local tech group’s Matrix space.

Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably one that plays nice with small screens.

Fuck Slack.. and interrupt driven workflows.