One thing that would be nice is to have the feed be human readable. It is as easy as adding a single line to the XML and setting the content type [1].
Your feeds are also missing a bunch of the headers that readers use to avoid over-fetching your feeds. I build an feed analyzer [2] to help debug things like this.
Really appreciate you reaching out and "self promoting" your project! Super useful! I tried to implement some of the feedback from your analyzer with my latest commit [1]. Feel free to open a pull request with additional improvements or leave them here.
RSS.style is my site. I'm currently testing a JavaScript-based workaround that should look just like the current XSLT version. It will not require the XSLT polyfill (which sort-of works, but seems fragile).
One bonus is that it will be easier to customize for people that know JavaScript but don't know XSLT (which is a lot of people, including me).
You'll still need to add a line to the feed source code.
I get where you are coming from, and have put some thought into it.
I built the site over 20 years ago, and while it was fun to make, I wouldn't have maintained it this long if is was costing me every month.
I've tried to minimize the intrusiveness: I disabled the pop-up and interstitial ads and I don't serve anything different to people with ad-blockers. And I've stuck with Google Adwords, despite requests from all sorts of questionable alternatives.
I'm not sure about the future: bots are causing all sorts of trouble, and the ad revenue is trending down and is now less than break even.
There wasn't free hosting in 2003 when I first made it. I have thought about converting it to static, but it would be a complete rewrite, and there is always some other new shiny thing to play with instead.
The newer things I'm doing (like UnicodeSearch.org) are static, though I don't like forcing everyone to have JavaScript enabled.
I know it probably won’t amount to a lot, but have you tried asking for donations? I love seeing websites I regularly use doing that and not just relying on ads.
I’m glad to hear it’s helping you keep the costs down - that’s positive.
It’s the type of popup that triggers my allergy - which as allergies go is mostly my problem.
Which is why Firefox is steadily losing market share.
If Mozilla wanted Firefox to succeed, they would stop playing "copy Chrome" and support all sorts of things that the community wants, like JpegXL, XSLT, RSS/Atom, Gemini (protocol, not AI), ActivityPub, etc.
With all due respect, this is a completely HN-brained take.
No significant number of users chooses their browser based on support for image codecs. Especially not when no relevant website will ever use them until Safari and Chrome support them.
And websites which already do not bother supporting Firefox very much will bother even less if said browser by-default refuses to allow them to make revenue. They may in fact go even further and put more effort into trying to block said users unless they use a different browser.
Despite whatever HN thinks, Firefox lost marketshare on the basis of:
A) heavy marketing campaigns by Google including backdoor auto-installations via. crapware installers like free antivirus, Java and Adobe, and targeted popups on the largest websites on the planet (which are primarily google properties). The Chrome marketing budget alone nearly surpasses Mozilla's entire budget and that's not even accounting for the value of the aforementioned self-advertising.
B) being a slower, heavier browser at the time, largely because the extension model that HN loved so much and fought the removal of was an architectural anchor, and beyond that, XUL/XPCOM extensions were frequently the cause of the most egregious examples of bad performance, bloat and brokenness in the first place.
C) being "what their cellphone uses" and Google being otherwise synonymous with the internet, like IE was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their competitors (Apple, Microsoft, Google) all own their own OS platforms and can squeeze alternative browsers out by merely being good enough or integrated enough not to switch for the average person.
I don't disagree with you, but given (A) how will Firefox ever compete?
One possible way is doing things that Google and Chrome don't (can't).
Catering to niche audiences (and winning those niches) gives people a reason to use it. Maybe one of the niches takes off. Catering to advanced users not necessarily a bad way to compete.
Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).
>Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).
Good thing they aren't? Firefox's detached video player feature is far superior to anything Chrome has that I'm aware of. Likewise for container tabs, Manifest V2 and anti-fingerprinting mode. And there are AI integrations that do make sense, like local-only AI translation & summaries, which could be a "niche feature" that people care about. But people complain about that stuff too.
And these aren't niche/advanced features? I'm using Firefox now, and did not know about them. If I'm using them, it is only accidentally or because they are the defaults.
But I'm agreeing with you! These features are important to you, an advanced user. The more advanced users for Firefox, the better.
For Firefox to win back significant share, they need to do more than embrace fringe scenarios that normal people don’t care about. They need some compelling reason to switch.
IE lost the lead to Firefox when IE basically just stopped development and stagnated. Firefox lost to Chrome when Firefox became too bloated and slow. Firefox simply will not win back that market until either Chrome screws up majorly or Firefox delivers some significant value that Google cannot immediately copy.
RSS and Atom feeds are at this point a solution looking for a problem.
I use RSS all the time... To keep up-to-date on podcasts. But for keeping up to date on news, people use social media. RSS isn't the missing piece of the puzzle for changing that, an app on top of RSS is. And in the absence of Reader, nothing has shown up to fill that role that can compete with just trading gossip on Facebook.
> But for keeping up to date on news, people use social media. RSS isn't the missing piece of the puzzle for changing that, an app on top of RSS is. And in the absence of Reader, nothing has shown up to fill that role that can compete with just trading gossip on Facebook.
I guess if you don't use social media or facebook you're out of luck?
I don't see why. You can always subscribe to a newspaper. Or just use RSS and a subscription tool since it didn't just go away.
What I'm saying, though, is if you don't use social media at this point you're already an outlier (I am, it should be noted, using the term broadly: you are using social media. Right now. Hacker News is in the same category as Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, et. al. in this context: it's a place you go to get information instead of using a collection of RSS feeds, and I think the reason people do this instead of that may be instructive as to the ultimate fate of RSS for that use-case).
The circulation for my local newspaper is so small that they now get printed at a press a hundred miles away and are shipped in every morning to the handful of subscribers who are left. I don't even know the last time I saw a physical newspaper in person.
> Hacker News... it's a place you go to get information instead of using a collection of RSS feeds
No, it's a place I go to _in addition_ to RSS feeds. An anonymous news aggregator with web forum attached isn't really social media. Maybe some people hang out here to socialize, but that's not a use case for me
The relevant use case is you come here to see links people share and comment on them. That's sufficiently "social" in this context.
Contrasting the other use case you dabble in (that makes you an outlier) of pulling content from specific sources (I'm going to assume generating original content, not themselves link aggregators, otherwise this topic is moot) via RSS. Most people see that as redundant if they have access to something like HN, or Fark, or Reddit, or Facebook. RSS readers alone, in general, don't let you share your thoughts with other people reading the article, so it's not as popular a tool.
> The relevant use case is you come here to see links people share and comment on them. That's sufficiently "social" in this context.
Just having users submit links that other users can comment on doesn't make it social media. I can't follow particular users or topics, I can't leave myself a note about some user that I've had a positive or negative experience with, I can't ignore someone who I don't want to read, etc. Heck, usernames are so de-emphasized on this site that I almost always forget that they're there.
A rose by any other name. If you'd prefer I'd have said
"But for keeping up to date on news, people use link aggregation boards where other users post links to stuff on the web and then talk to each other about them. RSS isn't the missing piece of the puzzle for changing that, an app on top of RSS is. And in the absence of Reader, nothing has shown up to fill that role that can compete with just trading gossip on Hacker News."
... that would be the same point. RSS, by itself, is a protocol for finding out some site created new content and is just not particularly compelling by itself for the average user when they can use "link aggregation boards where other users post links to stuff on the web and then talk to each othe about them" instead.
RSS hasn't gone anywhere. Every podcast my podcast player downloads is announced to it either via RSS or Atom feeds. It has just fallen by the wayside as the way people become aware of updates to websites with serial publication of content (in general: because most people get that information from peer-to-peer link sharing, like Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Fark, Reddit, Slashdot, or even this website).
They're not even removing the ability for the browser to render XML. They're just removing an in-browser formatter for XML (a feature that can be supported by server-side rendering or client-side polyfill).
Yes while their chosen formats directly aligned with their business get first class citizenship and suffer many larger and well known security issues. Xml will be next just wait.
What would that mean? XML is just text on the wire. If a browser stops supporting it... It's text on the wire. I slurp it in with JavaScript and parse it how I want.
The language in the browser for specifying what should show up and in what format is HTML and CSS. We can't remove them because we don't have anything to substitute; without them, there's just no displayable content.
Is your proposal that we replace those relatively heavyweight standards with something more primitive that we could then build the behavior on top of? I think there's meat on those bones. Quite frankly, the amount of work we do to push intent to fit the constraints of HTML and CSS in web apps is a little absurd relative to the frameworks and languages we have to do that in non-web widget toolkits. I'm not actually convinced that "Tk as an abstraction in the browser that we build HTML and CSS on top of" would be a bad thing (although we probably want to use something better than Tk, with more security guarantees).
... However, if we did that, we would really damage the accessibility story as it currently stands (since accessibility hinting is built on top of the HTML spec) and that's probably a bridge too far. We already have enough site developers who put zero thought into their accessibility; removing even the defaults HTML provides with its structure would be a bad call.
yes, but why???
Your on the website and you have a link to the syndicated feed, for the website your on, and you want to make they feed look good in the browser... so they can click the link to the website _you are already on_???
The argument you should be looking at the feed XML in the browser instead of the website is bonkers. They are not meant to replace the website coz if they were why have the website?!
But you are tech-savvy and know about RSS & feed readers and such like!
Think about it from a non-technical user's perspective: they click on a RSS link and get a wall of XML text. What are they going to do? Back button and move on. How are they ever going to get introduced to RSS and feed readers and such like?
I think a lot of feeds never get hit by a browser because there isn't a hyperlink to them. For example: HN has feeds, but no link in the HTML body, so I'm pretty confident they don't get browser hits. And no one who doesn't already know about feeds will ever use them.
I just checked and I’ve had 3 hits for my blog’s RSS feed from a legit-looking browser user agent string this year. Almost literally no one reads my site via RSS in the browser. Quite a few people fetch the feed from separate clients.
I wouldn’t spend 5 minutes making that feed look pretty for browser users because no one will ever see it. I don’t know who these mythical visitors are who 1) know what RSS is and 2) want to look at it in Chrome or Safari or Firefox.
What about people who don't "1) Know what RSS is"???
And what if you could make it friendly for them in 4 minutes? You could by dropping in a XSLT file and adding a single line to the XML file. I bet you could do it in 3 minutes.
Exactly, those changes which I believe were done at the time to create space for Google Plus (which I think in an alternative reality with some different choices and different execution could very well have been a relevant entrant into the social media space).
It involved driving a steak through the heart of Google reader. Perhaps the most widely used RSS reader on the planet, and ripple effects that led to the de-emphasis of RSS across the internet. Starting the historical timeline after those choices in summarizing it as an absence of market demand overlooks the fact that intentional choices were made on this front to roll it back rather than to emphasize it and make it accessible.
I would respectfully disagree in the following sense: I think the choice to shut down Google Reader and deprioritize RSS across the Google ecosystem (including the browser) did more to impact the trajectory of RSS than whatever was already in motion prior to the Reader shutdown.
And the same is true in the other direction, I want RSS to be a success but that would hinge on affirmative choices by major actors in the space choosing to sustain it.
I want to use it on an RSS feed: to make it sensible when a new users clicks on an RSS link.
I specifically want it to be served as XML so it can still be an RSS feed: I don't even need the HTML to look that great: I have the actually website for that.
One thing that would be nice is to have the feed be human readable. It is as easy as adding a single line to the XML and setting the content type [1].
Your feeds are also missing a bunch of the headers that readers use to avoid over-fetching your feeds. I build an feed analyzer [2] to help debug things like this.
[1] https://www.rss.style/
[2] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html
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