I honestly rarely hear about RSS. My idea is to build whatever users are asking and stop investing time in features that will go unnoticed but, since this is a young project, I might be wrong and losing something.
My question towards this community is...how many of you still use RSS to subscribe to content?
Tiny Tiny RSS: https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/explore
SelfOSS: http://selfoss.aditu.de/
Both include mobile apps and are open source with web based interfaces and JSON based API's to let you implement your own clients.
RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have a pretty nice design, but make it hard to get an overview of all the news and you easily miss things. With RSS I know that when I start my client all the articles they posted will be there and they will still be there when I start my client next month. I can manually mark articles that don't interest me as read, but keep others for when I have more time.
I follow about 50 sites, so if I had to check manually if any of them had updates (often in various sections, because they don't have a main overview that shows everything) I'd lose way more time. It's also synced over all my devices. I use the Reederapp in combination with Feedly, and it syncs over my Macs, iPhone and iPad. I have a backlog of about 500 articles, some months old, imagine having to go through a specific site and scrolling back page after page after page to get to that specific article you saw the title of 2 months ago.
I wish more sites would show the entire article in RSS feeds instead of a short preview. I understand the advertising reasons behind requiring users to click through, but with RSS you have a plain article that's optimized for reading without all the distractions of a website.
However, that very invisibility might prove to be its downfall: RSS is so incredibly useful to those who know about it that the only way to keep it going is for those of us who create to ensure our platforms keep creating it.
I miss seeing that little orange RSS icon though.
edit: I also miss seeing Dave Winer comment on threads like this!
I hope this helps.
Think of RSS as an advertisement for the stuff on your news site or blog. If you don't publish RSS, how will people find your stuff? By visiting the home page of your site and looking for stuff they haven't seen before? Sure, some people will do that. But people who read your site systematically, people who you would think of as members of your community, can benefit from more automatic notification. That's what RSS is for. All kinds of networks have developed around RSS. If you don't provide a feed, your site can't participate in those networks.
Also, how do you think links make it to Twitter and Facebook? Very often they were posted by people who follow your site's feed. So while most people aren't aware they're getting their links from feeds, they are.
I'm not aware of how the plumbing works in NYC, but I live there, and depend on it. Water flows in and out. Treated on both sides. RSS is the plumbing for news. It's best when it just works without you having to even be aware of it.
Here's an example. Sometimes I get so interested in a subject I put together a river site dedicated to news in that area. Earlier this week I did one for Major League Baseball.
The vast majority of the sites I went looking for feeds on had them, and they worked with my aggregator. I didn't need to contact anyone. And now they have a new source of flow, that didn't cost them anything, since they were already supporting RSS.
And Thanks so much for mlbriver. It will be a tonic for my seasonal affective disorder that I blame on the NBA and NFL seasons.
For me, RSS or Atom is the only usable way to keep up with rarely-updated sites. Twitter is too-fast moving, since it's very easy to miss interesting things in the noise. I don't like to use email because going through my inbox and acting on mail is very different from reading articles and blog posts and I like to keep them separate.
1) If blog/site generates content rare and provides RSS, I use Feedly to track it.
2) If blog/sites generates a lot of content I expect that someone in my Twitter feed will post link to really good article.
So yeah - RSS is still valuable.
Edit: Something to consider is that the people who submit links to places like Reddit and HN are probably much more likely than the rest of your users to use some kind of feed reader. Even if feed subscription numbers are low, those few "power users" might have a disproportionate effect on how much your content gets shared.
Disclaimer: One of our products is heavily rooted in consume large amounts of content from RSS feeds and providing tools to help users filter/sort/mine that content to find the really useful stuff, etc. So I do have something of a biased position here. But my position is truly as much ideological as anything.
RSS ain't dead!
I guess it depends on the content you're offering.
The best use case for RSS is if there's a source that occasionally puts out highly interesting content, on an unpredictable schedule. (This describes most of the feeds I'm subscribed to.) RSS (or something equivalent to it) enables you to not waste time checking it manually every day or whatever, while also being sure you won't miss anything when/if they do finally update. It's like switching from poll-driven to interrupt-driven I/O. I wish more things provided RSS feeds.
There isn't much buzz around RSS anymore, but there isn't buzz around telephony or email either, and yet all three technologies are still used every day by many people.
Spitting out an Atom feed really isn't that hard.
Edit: since it sounds like you have an existing feed, you could try going to some of the big reader sites (e.g., feedly) that tell you how many subscribers you have. For individuals using their own reader app, your server logs should give you an idea.
Actually something will have to be extremely compelling for me to bother keeping up with it if it doesn't offer an RSS feed.
RSS might not be as popular as it once was, but it certainly seems very popular in the our demographic :)
I would say that the people who do use RSS use it a lot. There might not be many left, but I'd say they would fit the "power user" category.
On the other hand, you might be able to skip building RSS features (idk exactly what kind of feature you were suggested) as long as you provide some kind of endpoint where people can plug ifttt and the like to get the same result (you can create the recipe yourself and advertise it)
The majority of content comes from few big sites so I put them into HF and just scan them and mark as read while others are organised as folders like:
Interesting |
Interesting | Australians
Interesting | Prose
My state | General
My state | Films
My state | Religion
Religion | General
Religion | Catholic
Religion | Orthodox
Tech | Personal Computing
Tech | Vendors
Tools | Excel
Tools | Emacs
Tools | Vim
Tools | PIM
Career | General
Career | SAP
Career | Professional accounting
Books | General
Books | Public domain
Books | University Press
Language | Blogs
Language | English
Language | Advice
Country | Defence
Country | Nutjobs
Country | Foreign media
(edit for spelling mistake)
I haves feeds grouped in the following Categories:
Tech News (all the major news tech sites which I check when I'm bored) Software (feeds from all the software I use so I get notified for updates etc). Photography (photography blogs I like to follow)
I still think its relevant and I actually find it very frustrating when I visit a site with content that could fit in RSS format but they don't publish a feed.
- You can watch your Github feed: it'll give you notifications of all pushes on repos you watch + things that people you follow do.
- You can watch JIRA and Confluence: I haven't found a better way to catch up on what happened overnight with the team members on other side of the world
- I subscribe to LWN.net for linux security alerts
- I subscribe to ~30 blogs of developers I respect
- I watch various comic strips.
As a developer, you need to decide if it's worth your time to implement (it's a single database query and some layout code to build an RSS/XML feed, not difficult at all).
Rawdog generates a new homepage for me a few times a day. I don't even have to put up with other people's crappy design and can enjoy information presented in my OWN crappy design.
I use inoreader.