Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Maybe you love being the consumer of RSS feeds, but you certainly wouldn't love being the poor bastard who has to parse them.

    Even though it's a simple standard that's been around for decades, there are still many sites which serve their feeds with a subtly wrong format. When something doesn't work, users come knocking on your door saying "it works in X reader but not in yours", so now you have to handle that and contribute to the ever growing list of out of spec edge cases that feed readers need to account for.

    by smarkov
  • I'm always surprised how many people who read my blog do so over RSS. It's probably one of my biggest traffic sources. (Definitely due to my niche topic and small reach, but still)

    I don't really use RSS myself anymore, though; not since I stopped using Google Reader a few months before they pulled the plug. Wouldn't even know where to start nowadays.

    by nicole_express
  • I'm quite happy with NetNewsWire.
    by oalders
  • I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago. I started a draft describing some of the problems that actually matter (thing that can’t be represented reliably in RSS, and such) in <https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss>.

    And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom.

    (I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)

    by chrismorgan
  • I think they are alive just because they are rough and weired
    by Arshad-Talpur
  • "Where's the popular front?"

    "He's over there."

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

    by cadamsdotcom
  • Thank you; that was a fun read! I had read that Atom was generally regarded as the technically superior format, but your article (and the links you helpfully provided therein) made it much more apparent why that is the case. :-)
    by F3nd0
  • I get your distaste, but RSS is the more famous wording of the technology. I would frame it as "people who love RSS - but technically these are Atom feeds". RSS is the word that stuck and I think we should keep promoting it and on a technical front I am with you - sure, let's use the Atom format "for RSS feeds".
    by moontear
  • Things that I noticed when I had a look at it: Atom supports multiple authors, RSS doesn't. Some say just separate them with commas, but readers don't understand that and it's all broken. Also Atom supports archive links for pagination to older entries. Some use the atom namespace inside of RSS to use archive links. No idea if there are feed readers that don't support Atom, but do support Atom tags inside of RSS.
    by panzi
  • I don't think this is helpful. The last statistic I saw put RSS at 77% of the web feed market share, higher than Atom. In the web feed market it isn't a protocol on the way out, its the dominant protocol.

    While RSS is tricky to parse in practice, many of the challenges are due to invalid feeds, which Atom is not invulnerable to. Its very likely that there is a well-tested feed parser for your favorite programming language, so most developers using feed programmatically don't need to handle those challenges themselves.

    For concerns like title encoding or summary vs full text description, you can handle those using namespaces. If you don't like any of the existing namespaces that do that you can create your own.

    by 8organicbits
  • Having structured feeds of any kind is already a niche and much appreciated when it happens. How to call them correctly technically based on some specs is not the hill to die on.

    We call them RSS feeds, RSS reader apps even if it might be implemented as an Atom feed.

    by dewey
  • Surprisingly cool site. I've seen lots of sites for RSS feeds but they aren't any good because they just dump their mountain of every feed that was ever known to exist, and there's not really any aspects of curation or discovery. RSS feeds themselves embody the exact way I think the internet should work, where the internet itself is the platform. However it's very nice to get some help finding new stuff.
    by pooploop64
  • HN renders emojis in color?! I’m reading that on an iPad and see a red heart. That’s a first
    by dgellow
  • that's specific to your os it renders in os emoji colors iirc.
    by minraws
  • first time also! depending on iOS for me.
    by cyptus
  • this is the first emoji I see on HN at all, they’re filtered out in comments.
    by dijit
  • It is not an emoji but a unicode character and HN doesn't render it, your OS does.
    by prmoustache
  • Not up to HN, it’s up to your font and font rendering.
    by pkulak
  • I only have a fairly basic understanding of encodings, but is this one by any chance in one of the smaller “standard” character sets and not in the huge Unicode “emoji” set?
    by clickety_clack
  • Nice! The entire https://pico.sh constellation of services are built off rss for notifications.

    https://pico.sh/feeds is an ssh app that is an rss-to-email service.

    by qudat
  • "RSS just needed people to reject the big-company hype" is why Im building my own reader. RSS was never the problem; it's the stuff around it: feeds truncated to a teaser, blogs dying and taking their archives with them, cloud readers logging everything you open.

    I'm building Cove (https://covereader.app), a native Mac app that works as a permanent local archive. Excerpt-only feeds get the full article fetched and extracted on-device in an offline WebView, stored LZFSE-compressed. It can also read articles aloud with streaming TTS that runs entirely locally, so nothing that you read leaves the machine. No account, no servers.

    Caveats: Mac-only, no sync yet, will be one-time purchase at 1.0 (beta is free now).

    by bullcitydev
  • If you love RSS, embrace Atom 1.0 :) Its the final modern form of RSS.
    by edhelas
  • Atom was killed by podcasts
    by culi
  • Why is Atom better?
    by graemep
  • Atom was killed by podcasts. Tbh RSS 2.0 is good enough
    by culi
  • Atom's problem is that RSS is also the final modern form of RSS.
    by CharlesW
  • Yeah, I've been writing software that provides feeds for RSS, but I exclusively use Atom. It's just a better format. It does create ambiguity when using a site like this because I'm not sure if my sites will qualify as having an RSS 2.0 feed or not.
    by rpdillon
  • It's great to see someone else using FeedLand. While it has some quirks, is has some clever ideas, like that blogroll feature.

    My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...

    by 8organicbits
  • It was designed that way, patterned after social media, where you share all that info. I wanted to see if it would work in RSS, and it came out pretty good.

    We're going to have a new version pretty soon, hooking it up with RSS.chat.

    by davewiner
  • seeing an emoji in a title on HN really surprised me, I didn’t even know you could do that. Shows how much emotion we use on here lol.
    by ninjahawk1