# RSS *created Nov 14, 2017* Collecting links. https://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/google-readers-shutdown-the-rise-of-walled-gardens-and-the-future-of-the-open-web/ https://marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown http://sawv.org/notes/another-bonus-point-for-rss-and-feed-formats-in-general-whether-they-be-xm.html > https://twitter.com/davepell/status/920757584662904832 > > Looking back, no one ever trolled me on RSS. http://sawv.org/2016/11/14/email-newsletters-vs-rss-feeds.html http://sawv.org/2017/06/22/november-2002-k5-post-about-rss.html http://sawv.org/2017/09/27/the-indieweb-community-can-be-too-fanatically-opinionated.html http://sawv.org/2016/01/26/blogosphere-v20.html http://sawv.org/2017/07/31/just-say-no-to-notifications.html http://sawv.org/2017/05/06/personal-publishing-design-options.html http://sawv.org/2017/06/21/dave-winers-june-2017-comments-about-the-indieweb.html http://sawv.org/2017/03/30/the-future-of-usercontributed-web-content.html http://sawv.org/notes/another-bonus-point-for-rss-and-feed-formats-in-general-whether-they-be-xm.html February 2018 https://digiday.com/media/flipboard-cozies-facebook-weary-publishers/ > Publishers just need a functioning RSS feed of their content to be distributed on Flipboard. https://davidyat.es/2017/05/18/rss-nothing-better/ ### Entity encode error in title tags Must use the hex version of the entity and not the named version. I think that this applies only to the title tag. Named entities are fine within description tags. Annoying. http://sawv.org/notes/test-post-14feb2018-1020-trying-to-fix-the-irritating-entity-encoding-issue.html --- Late March 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721690 http://scripting.com/2018/03/29/151338.html https://chat.indieweb.org/2018-03-30 https://chat.indieweb.org/2018-03-31#bottom http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722021 --- https://mobile.twitter.com/veganstraightedge/status/983062603483107329 > Turns out that in 2018, "RSS" and "ATOM" are still trigger words for nerds. --- https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2018-04-25/1524666556779600 > [tantek] Today in RSS Atom wars: https://twitter.com/ramsey/status/988904481738944512 https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2018-04-25/1524666563469900 > [tantek] (And I thought RSS had a frozen spec hosted at Harvard) https://mobile.twitter.com/ramsey/status/988904481738944512 > What's the simplest, most reliable way to programmatically distinguish Atom from RSS? I keep discovering edge cases. reply > Atom is supposed to follow RFC 4287 and should use a proper namespace. RSS has no formal spec. --- "Blocked by Facebook and the Vulnerability of New Media" https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/04/blocked-by-facebook-and-the-vulnerability-of-new-media/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932341 Top HN comment: > Another day, another argument for returning to RSS readers so we can filter for ourselves. https://getstream.io/blog/winds-2-0-its-now-time-to-revive-rss/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17129086 may 31, 2018 http://sawv.org/notes/stupid-rss-and-xml-and-how-it-handles-or-does-not-support-amper-signs-when.html july 2018 https://blog.notmyhostna.me/sad-state-of-rss-on-the-mac/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577442 august 2018 RssHub - A feed aggregator that can generate feeds from pretty much everything (rsshub.app) https://docs.rsshub.app/en/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17857079 --- Show HN: Feediary - RSS reader with zero tracking and zero ads (feediary.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17901092 https://feediary.com/ --- Interesting article about RSS and the feed wars. https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 I don't remember the feed wars because I simply used feeds, whatever they were. But I've read multiple articles about the feed wars of the early aught years. A lot of opinionated geeks had no interest in listening and cooperating. They probably did more harm than good for the open web. Back then and today, feeds were/are directly used by tech, media, and info geeks. https://mobile.twitter.com/davewiner/status/1041734830252281857?p=p > This article almost completely ignores podcasts, of which RSS is literally the lifeblood. That's false. From the twobithistory.org article: > RSS appears to be a dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters and programmers with tech blogs. > RSS 0.92 made several small optional improvements to RSS, among which was the addition of the tag soon used by podcasters everywhere. RSS had officially forked. DW tweeted in that above Twitter thread: > It ignores a lot of other things too, like the NYT and all the pubs that came after. That's also false. From the twobithistory.org article: > By 2004, the New York Times had started offering its headlines in RSS and had written an article explaining to the layperson what RSS was and how to use it. > Even the New York Times, which seems to have been eager to adopt RSS and promote it to its audience, complained in 2006 that RSS is a "not particularly user friendly" acronym coined by "computer geeks." > Before the RSS icon was designed in 2004, websites like the New York Times linked to their RSS feeds using little orange boxes labeled "XML," which can only have been intimidating. Twitter users may not have the patience to read long blog posts. Brent Simmons reply post: http://inessential.com/2018/09/17/oh_god_not_this_again > Every now and again there's a thing about the tragedy of RSS. Ugh. And predictably, Simmons and Winer will groan about those posts. > One is that, as Greg Reinacker once said, RSS is plumbing. That's true. XML and JSON feeds are plumbing. Computer programs create and read feeds. XML and JSON are not meant to be read by humans, especially non-tech people. > Another is that millions of mainstream users rely on it -- for podcasting, especially, but also because it powers other things that they use. They don't know that there's RSS under the hood, and that's totally fine. That's a nice argument for RSS, but how many people knowingly install or use a feed reader client app or website and add feed URLs to their feed reader or subscribe to feeds and then use their feed reader on a daily basis? > Another is that it's not necessary for RSS readers to become mass-market, mainstream apps. I'm sure I never said they would be, and I don't remember anyone else from the early days of RSS saying they would be, either. That's true, which is why feed reading has never died. Email has never died, even though the media pronounced email dead back 2005. Gopher has never died either. If a small percentage of people still use the tech, then it's still alive. The media, however, likes to define "alive" and "dead" tech based upon whether the tech has hundreds of millions of users. > It's totally fine if RSS readers are just used by journalists, bloggers, researchers, and people who like to read. Yes! It's a-okay. > I don't expect to see RSS readers running on every Mac and iOS device. This does not make it a failure. > It's 2018, and I think by now we're allowed to have things that some people like, but that not everybody uses. > Twitter itself is an RSS reader. No. Twitter is not a feed reader. Twitter is a silo, the cesspool of the internet. --- http://inessential.com/2011/06/15/what_we_talk_about_when_we_talk_about_rs --- great quote from a july 2003 post, during the so-called feed war years of the early aughts. https://web.archive.org/web/20030802041908/http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/004201.html > I spent much of last year immersed in the RSS world, and have been trying to withdraw ever since. Life is too short and summer is too precious to spend it inside dealing with a development community quite so socially dysfunctional. --- Jan 11, 2019 new and old links https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18878090 Some old links mentioned in the above motherboard article: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/ https://marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown https://mobile.twitter.com/mgsiegler/status/311992206716203008 http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/radar/r1/07-99.pdf https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss https://books.google.com/books?id=kwJVAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT21#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/04/portal.war.idg/index.html http://scripting.com/davenet/1999/06/16/aFaceOffWithNetscape.html http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-1-netscape http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/backissues/2000/06/07/#rss https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/07/05/deviant/rss.html RSS search at Hacker News: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS (twobithistory.org) - a few months ago - by the author of the above motherboard article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 It's time to head back to RSS? (wired.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721690 --- http://inessential.com/2019/03/11/feed_discovery_with_feed_compass --- RSS history via Dave Winer's March 1999 blog posts. Interesting. http://scripting.com/1999/03.html > Charlie Wood at Vignette says **RSS is too low-tech,** we should syndicate with their ICE protocol. Instead, let's go with something truly low-tech and open. RSS is a good beginning. I remember Vignette StoryServer. It was some kind of CMS/portal system, and, I think, it supported TCL in some manner. StoryServer was very expensive, of course. Too much for us back around 2000-2001, which is why we chose the Plumtree Portal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_Corporation > Defunct July 21, 2009 > In 2009, the company was acquired by Open Text Corporation RSS is NOT defunct. RSS continues because it's a spec that exists, available to anyone. RSS cannot be acquired by a corporation. The OpenText company still exists. It's Wikipedia page does not mention Vignette. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer > The templates were defined in the Tcl language, using extensions that made StoryServer's internal state and database available. From the Vignette Wikipedia page: > In January 1998, Vignette and Firefly Networks proposed the XML based Information and Content Exchange (ICE) protocol for content syndication and submitted the specification to the World Wide Web Consortium standards body on October 26, 1998. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_Content_Exchange > Using a client-server architecture, ICE defines a syndicate/subscribe model that is comparable to the binary publish/subscribe protocol standards used in CORBA and DCOM. However, in ICE messages are delivered through XML, typically over an HTTP connection, rather than through a lower-level binary protocol. > The standard failed to benefit from the open-source implementation that W3C XML specifications often received. --- In 2018, I played with MicroSub as a user. I did not develop any MicroSub client nor server code. I used web apps, created by other IndieWeb users. https://indieweb.org/Microsub https://indieweb.org/Aperture - MicroSub server, used to subscribe to feeds. https://aperture.p3k.io https://indieweb.org/Together - MicroSub client that displays the content from the feeds. https://alltogethernow.io Today, March 20, 2019, I logged into both systems for the first time in many months. Both Aperture and Together support IndieAuth. I did not have to remember my passwords or request new passwords. I logged in with my domain name sawv.org. The IndieAuth process checks my homepage and knows that rel="me" points to my email address. The IndieAuth server emails me a code. I know my email account password, and I'm usually logged into my email account when I'm using my laptop and phone. I retrieve the code from the email and drop it into the IndieAuth server page, and then the login process completed. Simple. Well, it seems simple to me. Others might consider the process too complicated. With the IndieAuth login process, I have no need for password management, and I don't struggle to remember or find passwords. The theory is that we have one or two main email accounts that we secure with strong passwords that we remember. That's all we need to log into IndieAuth-supported websites. Well a personal website/domain name too. --- Mar 30, 2019 --- Jun 2019 that referenced older links. Jun 26, 2019: http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/5896-RSS-theres-nothing-better ... that pointed to this: May 2017: https://davidyat.es/2017/05/18/rss-nothing-better/ .. and the corresponding May 2017 HN thread for that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675582 - 287 comments http://sawv.org/2017/11/13/november-2017-hacker-news-rss-discussions.html --- Aug 26, 2019 https://inessential.com/2019/08/26/netnewswire_5_0_now_available https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ --- Sep 18, 2019 Show HN: RSS/Atom Feed Reader in Go (github.com) https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008652 Funny HN comment: > Looks like this feed reader is a CLI application. OP, you might want to mention that in the title to attract the greybeards. http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/04/09/Clone-Wars https://kiriska.com/blog/2019/11/the-only-way-to-beat-algorithms-is-to-retrain-your-audience/ Show HN: A fast RSS reader I built with a friend (weloverss.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24123339 -30-