The '00s were such a wonderful time, the explosion in open access information, mashups (how I miss mashups!), easy publishing and the reach you could get from your sofa. RSS is the epitome of that, it's such a shame we have ended up with these walled garden social publishing platforms that lock our content down.
This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).
RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.
Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...
I've been discovering different tools to make the content I consume available via RSS. Some of those tools:
nitter: Alternative Twitter frontend that provides RSS feeds
teddit: Alternative Reddit frontend that provides RSS feeds (Reddit itself still has RSS feeds, we'll see how that plays out though)
rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS feeds
It's been refreshing to subscribe to the feeds I want to see and not have "recommended" content stepping all over what I want to see. Recent trends make me worried some of these services are going to go away in the near future though.
> rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
A bit of a shameless self-promotion plug: rss-bridge is great but I wanted to do the same from a command line program sending the output to stdout and without running a dedicated local web server, so I wrote newslinkrss ( https://github.com/ittner/newslinkrss/ )
It allowed me to replace a bunch of dedicated scripts at the cost of some complex command lines. It works pretty well for people who prefer desktop news readers to web-based ones.
You’re right It’s there but they don’t make it easy to get a feed. I also like having a single feed with new vids from every channel I’m subscribed to on invidious which I don’t think is possible on YouTube
> I also like having a single feed with new vids from every channel I’m subscribed to on invidious which I don’t think is possible on YouTube
That seems contrary to the idea that your RSS reader should be the one place you control your subscriptions from.
Which is something of a general problem—an on-site list of subscriptions is certainly also useful in ways the reader can’t really replicate in a generic way, yet it’s in the user’s interest to be the only one in control of that list instead of involving the website in it.
I can see the appeal of having a full feed RSS so you don't subscribe in two places, But I don't login and only use the RSS feeds. I use TT-RSS and just do subfolders for my feeds. If I click the Youtube folder it displays all the youtube feeds in order but I still have the option to drill down per channel.
You have to go looking for it. In my testing only provides the latest few videos, not the entire back catalog. But I have a naive understanding of the RSS protocol I didn't see how to get more because they didn't expose a "next" link for the RSS feed.
RSS isn't supposed to be an Archive, It's an activity feed. Best practice has providers trimming the XML file to the latest X items.
You can stylize and embed things like a next link in an RSS feed but that should just point you to yet another XML file and it's not part of the standard.
Shout-out to the Livemarks / Foxish plugins which gives you RSS support on your Bookmarks toolbar. Still nothing better IMO for quickly browsing dozens of headlines across dozens of sites.
Seems to feed the entire hn submissions firehose, and at least in my reader it doesn't let me click into the linked item from within my feed reader?
hnrss.org does both of those things, lets you subscribe to just the front page, and loads more besides - including replied to your own comments, which is how I was alerted to your posting of this.
> Supported by Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and other browsers
Unfortunately not supported by Mozilla Firefox 114 or Microsoft Edge.
It is still a very useful standard. I use https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss to add the icon to my browser. Plus even without browser support this allows you to just paste an article into your Feed Reader and most will use autodiscovery to find the feed for you. However without a browser icon you need to guess and check.
Mozilla removing long standing support for this from Firefox was a clear signal what their browser is for now and what it isn't for. Firefox is for running javascript applications and consuming DRM video and visiting your bank's website, just like chrome. It is not a browser for surfing the web and looking at websites.
Honestly the RSS support in Firefox and friends was just never that great. A long time back I used Sage and loved it, but when Firefox moved to use standardized plugins it wasn't an option anymore.
Mozilla throwing out their entire ecosystem of add-ons (like sage) so they could copy chrome's web extension instead of continuing their own far more powerful extensions was another of the indicators that Firefox is no longer a browser first. It is now a secure JS engine and DRM video first application for commercial transactions. Any ability to be a browser comes after those requirements are met.
Correction, Firefox is controlled opposition for Google to deflect from being accused of having a browser and browser engine monopoly. Mozilla post 2011 is a very different beast; they decided that copying Chrome was the way to go, stripping out all useful features culminating in the removal of the powerful XUL addon system citing security problems (while ironically the amount of malware extensions shot up AFTER they switched to the Chrome originated Web Extensions format, which are far less limited in capability). Meanwhile, the simple minded continue to fall for their claims of respecting privacy and user choice.
Most modern RSS feed-readers still use this `rel=alternate` link to allow users to just paste the URL of the site they want to subscribe to instead of forcing the users to look for and find the RSS link somewhere on the page. It's (surprisingly) very broadly implemented among sites and blogs that publish RSS.
I'm a big fan of FreshRSS (self-hosted) and if I need more powerful feature (such as filtering, dedup, webhooks) I use Inoreader, I have been using at least one rss reader since 2003 and there is no way silo's such as Twitter or others can do better than carefully curating ones own information feed.
Google+ was dead on arrival; Mozilla removed RSS support from Firefox long after Google+ was shut down. But of course, they have to dance to the tune of their biggest funder.
Although I haven't seen an addon that handles SPA well. Ideally it would monitor the DOM for links being added and removed. Although that may be expensive to do in an extension.
I still follow many RSS feeds (about 250). Sometimes it's hard to find the feed on a site, because the feeds aren't always advertised and their URLs can be tricky. Based on the URLs I've seen, I created a simple script to check if a site has a feed:
You can visit a channel's page directly, and copy the normal URL straight into your feed reader. It will do the right thing - thanks to the <link> tag, which YouTube advertises in the page source - as recommended by TFA. Your feed reader already knows what to do ;)
Interesting, maybe it depends on the reader. I tried a channel just now in newsboat and it wasn't smart enough to find the feed, even though I see the page contains
I use / have used: NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS), RSSGuard, Miniflux, TheOldReader.com, TinyTinyRSS, and some others I forgot about; I don't think I've seen one that doesn't support this feature. Perhaps you should open a bug / support request?
Unfortunately Youtube pushes shorts into the channels feed, presumably because shorts are normal videos under the hood.
For a time shorts had the string "#shorts" in their titles which was great for filtering those out but then youtubers started using custom tags. And filtering for "#" seems too risky.
I recently found out that my feedreader, Feedbin, allows a media_duration field in their search/action syntax. Now I’m using that experimentally for filtering.
Sidenote: Interestingly enough Youtube’s feeds don’t expose duration. Those feeds are ancient, apparently untouched for 15 years. The <media:content> element still advertises its videos as application/x-shockwave-flash. Feedbin, according to its code on Github, does some custom extraction of the duration from the Website for its data model.
(Googlers who may read this: Please, for the love of god, don’t change anything. A crappy feed is still better than no feed at all.)
Why Chrome to this date does not support RSS while all browsers that came before chrome had native support to at least read RSS xml files. Try opening any RSS xml feed in chrome, it will appear as plain XML.
I got back on the RSS Train by replacing my third party reddit client with NetNewsWire [1]. I've been enjoying it, and syncs across all my Apple stuff.
Keen to explore RSS again - specifically I'm wondering whether I can somehow integrate Mozilla's readability code into the flow - extract & clean articles as full feeds.
This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).
RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.
Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...