How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

Gordon_F, 2 months ago

They did the same with Flash with the help of adobe.

leanleft, 2 months ago

i found some info (via gemini)

haui_lemmy, 2 months ago

Google is a fucking nightmare. I‘m not gonna cite the article but damn they employed every dirty trick in the book it seems. The more I learn about EEE the more it disgusts me. All in the name of manipulation, monopoly and money.

archchan, 2 months ago

Business as usual at Google.

electricprism, 2 months ago

E.E.E.

Shamot, 2 months ago

But it’s clear that Google has a history of building products with RSS and killing the RSS support once it’s established a user base.

Not only RSS. It was the same with XMPP, and probably other things I don’t remember now. Better don’t rely on Google products.

pixelscript, 2 months ago

cough cough gmail

(I use gmail and need to stop)

Midnight1938, 2 months ago

What gmail do? Except the usual data tomfoolery

pixelscript, 2 months ago

The biggest and most obvious encroachment on standard email that Gmail does is opting for a tag system over a folder system. It is superior, but nonstandard. If you rely on this, it’s Gmail vendor lock-in for you.

chicken, 2 months ago

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?

Dianoga, 2 months ago

I believe there is a standard <meta> tag for an RSS feed

rinze, 2 months ago

Also, some (most?) RSS readers don’t need the path to the feed directly. You give them the regular URL and they’ll figure it out. TinyTinyRSS does it.

onoira, 2 months ago

feeds are usually advertised in the page header as below, with type set to either application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml.

<span style="color:#323232;"><</span><span style="color:#63a35c;">head</span><span style="color:#323232;">>
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  <</span><span style="color:#63a35c;">link </span><span style="color:#795da3;">rel</span><span style="color:#323232;">=</span><span style="color:#183691;">"alternate" </span><span style="color:#795da3;">type</span><span style="color:#323232;">=</span><span style="color:#183691;">"application/rss+xml" </span><span style="color:#795da3;">title</span><span style="color:#323232;">=</span><span style="color:#183691;">"Example Feed" </span><span style="color:#795da3;">href</span><span style="color:#323232;">=</span><span style="color:#183691;">"https://example.com/feed/"</span><span style="color:#323232;"> />
</span><span style="color:#323232;"></</span><span style="color:#63a35c;">head</span><span style="color:#323232;">>
</span>

i don’t know about chrom[e|ium], but i use Awesome RSS for firefox.

chicken, 2 months ago

That’s perfect since I use FF anyway, thanks

Mikelius, 2 months ago

How did I not know websites did this. Here I was always trying to guess the urls a few times before giving up lol. Today I learned…

Thanks for the extension suggestion too!

kevincox, 2 months ago

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.

drwho, 2 months ago

Yes, they do. In no particular order:

• 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.

scottmeme, 2 months ago

I will say I just found the RSS feeds for News, like as of 2 days ago.

leanleft, 2 months ago

you could always write a scraper but javascript makes this a non-trivial task

LWD, 2 months ago

Just import a headless web browser into your scraper, of course! Couldn’t be easier 🙄

AtariDump, 2 months ago

Care to share it? :)

kevincox, 2 months ago

news.google.com/rss will redirect to a feed for the top content in your region.

You can also make a search and paste that URL into your feed reader and it will find the feed to subscribe to that search.

scottmeme, 2 months ago

news.google.com/rss

www.aakashweb.com/…/google-news-rss-feed-url/

AtariDump, 2 months ago

Thanks!!