I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex. There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.
Hey, looks like you had a very similar idea to me!
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/
Though you've gone for the 'simple one-pager' approach where I tried to sell people on it via a full site.
I was going to do a visual revamp sometime soon, hopefully include more readers etc but time has been an issue.
>There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS:
1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow
2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach)
My favourite rss reader NewsBlur (no affil, just very happy user) allows subscribing to YouTube channels just by entering its URL - no need to digging for RSS feed :)
I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.
In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.
Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p
PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)
> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.
I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
What’s unusually about the feed ecosystem is that it was once popular, and now it’s present but nobody really understands it. Like, Wordpress sites are 30% of the web and they have RSS by default... but are the site owners really aware? It would be a hard push to get any of them to change.
And, for most technologies, the existing users are the best word of mouth evangelists. But here, the existing users have their own favourite apps, and if you change anything too much then they won’t evangelise.
So (imo) growing the ecosystem means finding ways that respect that situation.
uh, I think "abstracting away concepts" is the base for enduring cluelessness and thus dependencance.
Still the UX has to be excellent. As you wouldn't abstract the fact of a sharp edge off a knife. Still the grip has to be very different from the sharp edge. It's 2 things that have to balance to make sense. The worse limits the result.
No user ever is bothered with Atom spec technicalities, is it?
Would you mind letting people know about the ATOM format as well? The sentence
1. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS)
is wrong. It is not "a.k.a. RSS". It must be "What is Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RSS)?"
ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM.
Great work. This should be extended to podcasts and images would be nice as well. At the end, maybe there is no way anymore to get non-technical people interested into these technologies if they can get their news from a preinstalled "news-app" and "podcasts" from spotify.
I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.
Illustrations would definitely help, you’re right. It’s in our issues list, and I have some ideas about simple ways to address that. Issues list is on Github incidentally https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds
Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?
It especially does because people think that being against 'Chinese apps' like TikTok is 'sinophobia', when really we love Chinese people it's just the government we don't trust. So it really does makes it special to see those Chinese characters in that README. I want to see more of that.
But I also immediately feel concern. I hope this Shanghai developer is not targeted, bullied, or persecuted in any way like having their money seized.
Damn. Just donated to their PayPal because I feel so encouraged by it.
I think this is bullshit. It's like saying, "I'm not racist, my friend Bob is black."
You don't get a "get outta jail free" card for saying "I love CHinese people" and "oorah for China devs" and then heaping shit all over their country's achievements the rest of the time.
Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a little bit?
Me, too. Seafile is another good example. Gogs was great nbut the sbdfl went awol too often. Its fork Gitea still has many Chinese devs, though and is one of my favorite projects with Asian roots.
Took me a while to get this one — so people from communist China don’t cover their origins, for they’re from a completely isolate culture or being bold in a way, or whatever, and put Chinese readme high up and front, or talk in clearly Chinese grammar, whereas other non-European devs tries to stay under the radar and blend in as a generic non-native English speaker. Isn’t that it?
I mean, I’m a Japanese but how I notice a developer is a good fellow countrymen is usually through noticing telltale signs and chasing them down, not because there’s a filename in the language I speak at the root of a repository.
If I see more than one language in a repo or the developers' names sound foreign to me, I'm more likely to check out their profile.
I always love to find out more about (development) culture in other parts of the world. Can you elaborate a bit on how it's 'bold' to use your own language in a README or docs? Do you find it annoying?
Those may be correlated with a lack of family and, thus, more free time for personal projects. Not that one outgrows an appreciation of anime once married, but that the tendency toward cute girl avatars probably decreases.
I was going to counter that it could instead just be that they're not employed, in education, or in training. But personally, I'm employed and can devote entire weekends and evenings to side projects. Family would certainly take up the rest of that time.
Edit: Actually just noticed your comment was about anime girl avatars, and not the project quality. I have no opinions on that matter.
I’m curious: why is this using RSS? RSS is uniformly technically inferior to Atom, and all feed reader apps that I know of support Atom, and libraries are available for both (some RSS-only, some Atom-only, some general). The only place I’d ever use RSS now is podcast feeds, because podcast feeds haven’t caught up up with 2007 yet.
For the most part you only care that it’s a feed, but the technical inferiority of RSS does matter from time to time. My favourite example is having things that look like HTML markup in a title. All RSS specs are silent on what that means and there’s no popular XML namespace that fixes that like with content:encoded¹. So some clients will treat it as plain text, some will treat it as HTML and strip it, some will treat it as HTML and render it. (Some will double-encode it, but that’s a bug in the reader. Atom probably won’t save you from that kind of error.) The result is that in RSS you simply can’t safely use <, > or & in a title, because no matter how you do it, it will be mangled by some meaningful fraction of clients. Meanwhile, Atom has <title type="text"> and <title type="html"> and the problem is averted; almost all clients will get it right, and any that get it wrong are unquestionably buggy so you can file a bug report and hopefully get it fixed.
———
¹ And seriously the whole podcast RSS scene is full of “well RSS is bad, so let’s add our own elements to fix it” namespaces, so that you’re writing the same thing four or five times, where Atom would have obviated at least some of those.
There is no reason to use Atom. RSS has in practice some specifics like content:encoded and description that are strange at first look, but by now are solved in every reader. So why not just use the standard that works?
You can get everything as ATOM, as well. From the docs:
RSSHub conforms to RSS 2.0 and Atom Standard, simply append
.rss .atom to the end of the feed address to obtain the feed
in corresponding format, default to RSS 2.0.
Maybe someone else will benefit from my experience as well: I recently wanted to create an RSS feed for https://www.apmreports.org/ as they didn't seem to offer one, nor did Feedly (my preferred RSS reader) manage to find one that was up-to-date. I ended up using http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ instead because there wasn't an existing route in RSSHub that I could use, and it didn't seem trivial to set one up for this particular case; I hope someone will prove me wrong though.
With the Feed Creator feed URL I'm not able to see the content within Feedly (it just says "no content"), but it does relay new posts to me, which I can open directly, and it was amazingly quick to get a functional feed URL, so I'm very happy nonetheless.
This is interesting, I was building something similar for my personal use case a while ago but there I have to build a plugin for each website I want to support which is not ideal (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge). I'll have to check it out, community maintained integrations make a lot more sense.
> Your catchword is "share", but you don't want us to share. You want to keep us within your walled gardens. That's why you've been removing RSS links from webpages, hiding them deep on your website, or removed feeds entirely, replacing it with crippled or demented proprietary API. FUCK YOU.
> You're not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds. You're happy to have customers creating content for your ecosystem, but you don't want this content out - a content you do not even own. Google Takeout is just a gimmick. We want our data to flow, we want RSS or Atom feeds.
> We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.
> We are rebuilding bridges you have wilfully destroyed. Get your shit together: Put RSS/Atom back in.
From that readme. Nice project!
I wish someone would make a social rss reader. It would be pretty neat. Although, activitypub might be better protocol for that.
I'm currently using rss-bridge and have not had that great of an experience. I put some of that down to the site-specific bridges, but some problems persist:
- I regularly recieve feed updates that mark all articles as "new" (i.e. the bridge fails to recognize that it already exported some articles before)
- I also often receive "error 521" from rss-bridge (i.e. the bridge cannot create a feed), but on manual investigation, the feed can be created just fine. I assume this is due to a lack of request throttling somewhere in the process, but can't be bothered to investigate.
Nice! I am excited by this. I decided to go back to trying RSS after a blogger I enjoy got deplatformed from where I usually found their stuff. I installed a firefox rss reader and it was fine. But today after seeing this I realized I wanted more centralized RSS to have it synced on difference devices. So I went and installed FreshRSS over the past 30 mins on my webserver, added a MariaSQL db and user, added a Apache subdomain, directed my DNS to it, ran letsencrypt, fired up the web config, added my feeds, and we're up and running in 30 mins flat.
Next I guess I have to install this thing to RSS-ify other channels I like.
What might be the best way to aggregate multiple RSS feeds onto a webpage? So have been recently thinking about density of information and I want to create a webpage with as much information as possible and park it on a large 55inch screen I have in my home-office.
Readit News
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.
We both opted for "web feeds" over "RSS", which makes me feel better about that choice.
Do you have any sense of whether you've been able to reach new users? It's going to take a lot of effort from us and people like us, I think.
You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS:
1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow
2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach)
3) Then you have the url https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel-ID-here> (for example colinfurze's channel ID would be UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw
4) Now the last thing left is combine that channel ID with the following: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel... and add it to your RSS feed! (For example the full colinfurze url would be: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCp68_FL... ) Easy, isn't it? :)
My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.
In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.
Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p
PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)
I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.
I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
What’s unusually about the feed ecosystem is that it was once popular, and now it’s present but nobody really understands it. Like, Wordpress sites are 30% of the web and they have RSS by default... but are the site owners really aware? It would be a hard push to get any of them to change.
And, for most technologies, the existing users are the best word of mouth evangelists. But here, the existing users have their own favourite apps, and if you change anything too much then they won’t evangelise.
So (imo) growing the ecosystem means finding ways that respect that situation.
Still the UX has to be excellent. As you wouldn't abstract the fact of a sharp edge off a knife. Still the grip has to be very different from the sharp edge. It's 2 things that have to balance to make sense. The worse limits the result.
No user ever is bothered with Atom spec technicalities, is it?
ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM.
Thank you.
I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.
Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?
A lot of the software I use and contribute to has gained many contributors from China, Singapore and Japan through the last 1-2 years.
It really warms my heart to see that FOSS knows less and less borders :)
But I also immediately feel concern. I hope this Shanghai developer is not targeted, bullied, or persecuted in any way like having their money seized.
Damn. Just donated to their PayPal because I feel so encouraged by it.
You don't get a "get outta jail free" card for saying "I love CHinese people" and "oorah for China devs" and then heaping shit all over their country's achievements the rest of the time.
Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a little bit?
Is there a case where we hate the people ? Are people as a collective harmless.l ?
I wonder what platform they used before but I don't know any of them personally. I only read their Github bios.
I used Seafile and it's great but it has a pretty hard paywall.
Gitea is just great. In conjunction with Drone it's the most elegant CI/CD platform I know.
I mean, I’m a Japanese but how I notice a developer is a good fellow countrymen is usually through noticing telltale signs and chasing them down, not because there’s a filename in the language I speak at the root of a repository.
I always love to find out more about (development) culture in other parts of the world. Can you elaborate a bit on how it's 'bold' to use your own language in a README or docs? Do you find it annoying?
Edit: Actually just noticed your comment was about anime girl avatars, and not the project quality. I have no opinions on that matter.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
———
¹ And seriously the whole podcast RSS scene is full of “well RSS is bad, so let’s add our own elements to fix it” namespaces, so that you’re writing the same thing four or five times, where Atom would have obviated at least some of those.
It does support atom. You need .atom at the end. By default, it's rss V2.
Atom is interoperable and extensible and great care was taken during design and implementation testing to achieve these goals.
RSS, OTOH, is garbage on fire ruined by one man's ego.
https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc...
With the Feed Creator feed URL I'm not able to see the content within Feedly (it just says "no content"), but it does relay new posts to me, which I can open directly, and it was amazingly quick to get a functional feed URL, so I'm very happy nonetheless.
A pragmatic approach. Trying to build a generalized framework handling each and every edge case promises endless complexity.
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
> Your catchword is "share", but you don't want us to share. You want to keep us within your walled gardens. That's why you've been removing RSS links from webpages, hiding them deep on your website, or removed feeds entirely, replacing it with crippled or demented proprietary API. FUCK YOU.
> You're not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds. You're happy to have customers creating content for your ecosystem, but you don't want this content out - a content you do not even own. Google Takeout is just a gimmick. We want our data to flow, we want RSS or Atom feeds.
> We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.
> We are rebuilding bridges you have wilfully destroyed. Get your shit together: Put RSS/Atom back in.
From that readme. Nice project!
I wish someone would make a social rss reader. It would be pretty neat. Although, activitypub might be better protocol for that.
- I regularly recieve feed updates that mark all articles as "new" (i.e. the bridge fails to recognize that it already exported some articles before) - I also often receive "error 521" from rss-bridge (i.e. the bridge cannot create a feed), but on manual investigation, the feed can be created just fine. I assume this is due to a lack of request throttling somewhere in the process, but can't be bothered to investigate.
Next I guess I have to install this thing to RSS-ify other channels I like.
This is kind of exciting.