I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?

So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!

P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

A year or two ago when the decay of social media became a popular topic of discussion, there was a lot of talk about a resurgence in the use of RSS readers. My impression recently was that the RSS renaissance hadn't really materialised in the end, but I realised that if it had it would be pretty hard to tell.

So, Tildes users: do you use an RSS reader currently? If so, is that a recent decision? Tell me about your experience.

Just recently started getting into rss feeds. Have set up a feed reader and some feeds for my favorite sports team and some news sites and blogs that interest me. But whenever I look up some recommendations for new feeds to follow, I'd say 90%+ of the recommendations are news sites like the BBC or NYT as well as tech news sites.

Does anyone have any feed recommendations that aren't just news websites? Maybe an interesting blog or something entirely different? Thanks.

I'll drop an interesting one that I found right here on tildes a few days ago, about life in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/

It's not something I've thought about much until I had a conversation with someone who sets up their RSS reader, and uses it, completely differently to me.

I self-host FreshRSS, and typically just use the Web UI provided by that - sometimes I use Android RSS apps to consume from that, but I've never found one I like that much. But I just categorize my RSS feeds by broad theme, e.g. computing & tech, local news, programming, tech news, gaming, business and so on...

For the most part, I just browse through my main feed a few times per day and see if anything catches my eye. The only exception to this is that I have a few feeds in the 'Important' feed. One example is the forum related to a university project, where I need to know about entries pretty quickly.

The person I was discussing with never subscribes to anything noisy. No BBC, no Ars Technica, and really nothing that posts more than once per day. They split their feeds into "Important", "Casual", "Videos", "Podcasts" (I never thought to add Podcasts, as I use a separate map) and "Comics". They have it set up with the intention of reading everything that comes through.

I respect the curation effort that it must take to have an RSS feed where everything is interesting enough that you'd want to read it all. But for me, RSS is a method of discovering content. I don't need it too clean or overly curated. For the most part, I'm just going to skim it for interesting titles and subjects. The most curation I do is removing feeds after a while, if I notice I'm never interested in their content.

I'm very keen to hear how you use RSS.

I know medium has an RSS feed that can be accessed by adding /feed/ before the username/publication name but it's truncated if the publication has a paywall. I've been looking for a way to get the full-text feed but could not find a solution, it looks like it adds a parameter to the link in the rss feed, similar to ?source=rss-d00bc5bb7954------2 but I can't figure out how to remove it. any ideas ?

With the introduction of the new groups, I now, for the first time, have unsubscribed from some groups here on Tildes. I've been subscribed to the fire hose feed in my feed reader, but I'd love to get a feed that is personalized with only my subscriptions. Does this exist? If not, could it?

I recently decided to start using RSS to curate interesting news as I feel I am being overloaded with Clickbait from all directions when I am looking for the latest news or updates on Google. I'm looking for some good sources for Tech or Programming Articles or news that aren’t just clickbait and have good informative content.

I currently have BBC News, Krebs On Security and Ars Technica, does anyone have any other website suggestions which are worth subscribing to?

Ars Technica Information Technology - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/technology-lab
Ars Technica - Gaming & Entertainment - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/gaming
BBC Tech - http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml
Krebs On Security - https://krebsonsecurity.com/feed/

I subscribe to quite a few youtube channels to get notified when there are new videos posted. I've had this set up for several years.

Today I tried to add a new channel I've discovered. My RSS reader informs me it's blocked. I check all the other youtube feeds. Every single one of them reports "Error transferring <feed url>." server replied Forbidden (201).

Update: One day later and every feed is connecting and transferring again. It seems to be a temporary block. My IP address has changed overnight though so that's still my main suspicion.

It seems like I'm not the only victim

That contains a link to the author's issue on google's issue tracker

The official response is

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29752447/how-to-get-a-youtube-channel-rss-feed-after-2015-april-20-without-v3-api


They completely misunderstood the question - it's not asking how to find a feed, it's asking why that feed is getting blocked.

Not only this but using DuckDuckGo bangs for to search google get randomly sent to a captcha page - issuing the exact same query a second time goes through perfectly. The same is happening with keyword searches I set up in my browser. .

Any ideas what to do about this?

So sick of google's monopoly.

hey tilders,

so I mostly read tildes.net content through my RSS reader, and it's 98% great. the remaining 2% is due to two things:

• HTML entities (fancy quotes, etc) don't degrade nicely; I get a lot of &#xxx; in my feed reader - Edited topics (I think) get posted twice to the RSS feed, giving me duplicate items.

I don't know how hard it might be to fix these issues, but is there anything I can do to help?

Inspired by this post, I was wondering what RSS feeds you all subscribe to and how you read them.

Here are mine:
http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/headlines
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/world
http://feeds.nature.com/nature/rss/current

I'm just started using Newsboat, a CLI RSS reader, to read in a few feeds (Reuters was one of them :( ) and it's pretty refreshing to get a text-based newsfeed with no distraction. Though, the feeds I'm subscribed to only give me a brief blurb of the news...

Every now and then I come across a limited-run podcast that wrapped up ages ago and I want to add it to my feed. I don't want to manually click through the old episodes one by one, I want to subscribe to it as if it were being published in realtime. Are there any tools that can help me with this?

I think what I'm looking for is some sort of app that republishes an existing RSS feed with a date offset based on whatever recent date you subscribe to it. Even better would be something that lets me specify my own custom drip rate so I can binge through large catalogs at my own pace.

I've been thinking about coding something like this but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if an existing solution is already out there.

From time to time I see people on the internet who remember Google Reader fondly, and miss it. At the time, I didn't have much use for something like it, so I never used it.
But a common theme in these conversations about Google Reader is that no other feed reader ever offered everything Google Reader could, but I can't seem to find details.

So what was it? Does anyone here remember Google Reader, or even still wishes it was available? Why did nothing come from the Open Source community that could replace it?

As the title say, does tilde have RSS feeds for topics? I'm thinking a feed for the frontpage, as well as feeds for each group?

I've looked around but it doesn't seem like there is. Is the feature planned? Has it been decided against? Am I the only one who'd like the feature?

Does or will tilde have RSS feeds for the frontpage and for groups?

I've recently gone back to using RSS as a way to keep up with things that I like to follow, and I realized that it could be a good fit for tildes. I'm a developer by trade, so if other people are interested too I could even help with development (though not until I graduate in December, I'm slammed with work and school at the moment).
Any thoughts for or against RSS?

I am always looking for quality RSS feeds to add to my reader but they seem to be getting harder and harder to find. I've been looking for a good one for movie trailers for a long time. Apple has one but the trailers are published sporadically. I'm especially interested in any full-article feeds.

I've been following GRRM's Not A Blog and XKCD's webcomics via RSS. My favorite though is a very niche webcomic about older gamers sitting around playing a RPG:

http://www.kodtweb.com/feed/

Could we have RSS or Atom feeds that correspond to a given view?

There could be two kinds of feeds, one that links to the comments page, and one that follows the link itself. The comments feed for ~comp could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=comments, and the link feed could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=link, or something like that. Ideally this could apply to tags as well, so if I just wanted to see posts in ~comp tagged web, I could view https://tildes.net/~comp?tag=web&rss=comments.

Several similar sites have this ability, so it's nice to be able to browse them all in one place. (On Reddit you can put .rss at the end of a subreddit for a feed, and on Hacker News and Lobsters it's just /rss).

What do you think?

Hello,

I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.