The browser had a built-in RSS button that would display in the browser location bar when any website you're on had an RSS feed available. Clicking the button would then take you to the RSS feed for that web page
How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place? Are there any third party extensions that do it?
Most readers will also do this auto-discovery for you. So typically you can just paste the page or article URL and it will find the feed.
Of course the extension is nicer because you don't need to guess and check, you get a quick indicator if there is a feed or not.
Personally I use Want My RSS because I like the preview which then lets me know if it is a full-text feed or just summaries. This is also Firefox only. But extensions for other browsers are available.
Do a View Source on the site's frontpage. You might see some HTML for "application/atom+xml" or "application/rss+xml". The URLs associated with those hrefs will be for the ATOM and RSS feeds.
If you search for one of the following in the HTML source you'll probably run into the feeds:
rss
atom
feed
json
Look for a syndication page on the site. It should have links to the feeds.
You might see the https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Generic_Feed-icon.svg or the https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Application_atom%2Bxml.svg on the page.
Many CMSes (Wordpress in particular) automatically put them at /feed on the site.
Many popular sites have dropped it. New sites often don't support it in the first place. In cases they do, it's a truncated version. Only a snippet/topic is visible and rest relinks to a browser. It is still better than nothing but the halcyon days of RSS are gone, IMO.
The truncated versions are annoying, but honestly I understand why. These websites live entirely off ad sales, without them they go bankrupt. So letting RSS readers scrape an ad-free version of an article makes no sense to them.
I've been using RSS for literally 18 years and that has always been the case. News sites make money by advertising, they get no advertising if you just read the RSS feed, so they give you a snippet.
It would be nice if every site was like Arstechnica and gave you a full text ad free RSS feed when you pay to subscribe.
Why not? That's based on the current system of websites loading in third party ad providers. If you include the ads in the article/have sponsors etc. they will come through the rss.
It's not perfect, but newsletters are making do it with just fine. I read a couple newsletters with them but make no effort to remove them like I do with web articles, because they are not disruptive, inappropriate, heavy or privacy invasive.
The difficulties in monetisation is what had been slowly killing RSS support on websites. There have been services that have tried to solve this problem, one is mentioned in the article, but they don’t seem to have had wide adoption.
It’s not just inserting ads either, today it’s also the pervasive tracking that makes money.
RSS was great for things like personal blogs, but commercial sites came to see little value in it, and have been dropping it as a result.
i miss reading quality cracked articles on rss. there isn't really any article-length comedy anymore anywhere is there. it's all dry stuff or deranged opinions
I had planned a train trip that started to seem pretty unlikely when the relevant union started talking about a strike. I needed to check the union’s site every day to see how the negotiations were going. Doing that through RSS would have been nice, but the site didn’t support it and none of the apps I tried were able to help me either. Do I need to craft my own webscraping code and make a cron job to run it every hour?
Just to add, while I don’t think they’re the cause of the decline of RSS on the web, Apple hasn’t entirely helped here either. They did some great work adding RSS support to both their Mail.app client and Safari, only to remove them a few releases later.
Honestly, yeah I think that's how it worked for me too. Reddit wasn't exactly the same, but depending on how you curated your subreddits, it could fill a similar role.
The crazy thing is, they had a nascent social network going with Google Reader, populated by people who were engaged and interested in the content. And they threw it all away to chase a Facebook clone, which was doomed anyway.
They could've had basically Reddit if they added a way to have comments in Google reader. Then again, they would've never invested in moderation, so it probably would've turned into a shitheap.
Google+ could have been successful to a degree, in terms of features it was an improvement over Facebook in several ways. The problem was the invite only launch.
The invite period worked for Gmail because it was still interoperable with other email services, and made getting a Gmail address seem exclusive and desirable. Making a walled garden social network invite only, however, just lead to it being empty. Most who did sign up looked around for a few minutes then went back to Facebook.
They only thought they moved away from RSS feeds. A whole bunch of the internet is built on Wordpress which publishes an RSS feed by default at website.url/rss or website.url/feed. Which means a shitload of sites are running feeds even if they don't advertise it (or realize it).
Podcasts by definition are all RSS based, but Spotify, Amazon and other VC based distributors are trying to change that with subscription and exclusive content.
Even those are still announced via RSS I believe though.
openrss.org
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