News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.
The ability of sites to be found on the web has become increasingly difficult with social media platforms penalizing posts that contain links, mountains of AI slop ranking above legitimate sites and Google showing users AI summaries that reword information instead of sending searchers to the originators. The programmer and writer Molly White says there's a way to read the sites you care about…
The Spanish public broadcaster RTVE has begun blocking the podcast media files for its radio station RNE from being downloaded by some podcasting apps, reports James Cridland for Podnews : One such podcast app that RNE is blocking is AntennaPod , a free podcast app on Android. It's one of the most popular apps on Android -- and in Spain, 78.8% of Spanish mobile phone users use Android mobile…
Because there's now an RSS feed for this weblog hosted locally at https://rssweblog.com/rss-feed , the server logs reveal the RSS readers and other software that regularly check the feed for updates -- at least the ones that report themselves in the user agent of their HTTP requests. Here are some that have turned up in the first 10 days. RSS-to-Telegram Bot (RSStT) RSS-to-Telegram Bot , also…
The major browsers used to indicate that a website had an RSS feed by displaying the orange RSS icon in the address bar at the far right of the bar. This no longer happens but an extension offered by Google's Ireland division adds it back to Chrome. The RSS Subscription Extension looks for a site's feeds using RSS Autodiscovery . A feed is identified using a link element in the page header. After…
The RSS Blog has used an RSS feed hosted on Google FeedBurner for many years, though recently we moved to a new feed on this domain, giving us more control and a chance to retain subscribers when FeedBurner someday shuts down. FeedBurner is putting things in the feed that aren't in the source feed we provide to the service, like these channel-level elements from the itunes namespace:…
The story of RSS has been told in fanzine form by cartoonist Audra McNamee and contributor Allia Service in RSS is (Not) Dead (Yet) . The 12-page comic released in 2023 describes how the original RSS boom died 10 years earlier when Google Reader shut down, after which the rise of social media did further harm by pulling users into silos and rejecting the ethos of the open web. McNamee and Service…
The non-profit advocacy group Open RSS has an interesting RSS scoreboard that rates the RSS readers that request its feeds, indicating whether they meet the following criteria: open source, self-hostable, filtering, search, folders, import/export, full-text mode, mark read on scroll, sorting, custom rules, language translation and offline reading. The page also indicates whether they have browser…
The RSS Blog has added a new RSS feed hosted at our domain. Copy this URL into your feed reader of choice to get our blog posts every time we update: https://rssweblog.com/rss-feed For most of this blog's existence we've been hosting our RSS feed at FeedBurner, the Google service that was once used for feed readership analytics and other feed enhancements. These days it only offers caching and…
The free audiobook service LibriVox , which has volunteers narrating thousands of books in the public domain, offers an RSS feed for each book. Here's the RSS feed for This Crowded Earth , a 1958 science fiction novel by Robert Bloch: https://librivox.org/rss/2921 There's an item element in the feed for each chapter with an enclosure containing the audio of that chapter. Add the feed's URL to…
The RSS Blog now has a favorite freestyle skateboarder. Tony Gale is making sure that visitors to the website of his professional association know about RSS : I've been working on the website for the WFSA -- the World Freestyle Skateboarding Association -- for the best part of a year. It has become very apparent that next to no one knows what RSS is these days (or realizes that it still exists),…
The blogosphere has regrown some connective tissue with the presence of Feedle , a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Feedle is both a consumer and producer of RSS , as developer Preslav Rachev explained in the launch announcement from 2022: The thing I like most about Feedle is that it is about making RSS feeds more accessible to the general public. And not just any RSS feeds. The team has…
After trying an RSS reader for a few days, a contributor on Reddit has declared that RSS is "kind of dog----" and not worth the hype. They don't like that many feeds contain the partial text of posts to get you to finish reading at the link: So over the last 2 days I installed a local FreshRSS instance. Oh boy is it bad. Most sites want you to read articles on their website to generate traffic, so…
Echo is a Node script to post new items from an RSS feed to microblogging services and social media sites. It requires Node.js version 19, though some earlier versions might work, and installation instructions can be found on the GitHub repository for the project. The script currently supports Micro.blog, Mastodon, Omnivote, GitHub and Webhooks.