Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

• BlogDB

  3 12 3.9 CSS

  The BlogDB Webservice

I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction.

The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html

• timeline

  5 6 8.7 JavaScript

  Timeline generator. Turns your photos, calendars, GPS tracks and more into a nice timeline of your life.

I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing (https://github.com/nicbou/timeline) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites.

However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us clunky one-time exports, but even those are often incomplete.

The industry has a strong incentive to kill RSS, since the readers can strip the valuable bits (content or data) from the business bits (analytics, monetisation). RSS users are hard to count or monetise.

This is a battle worth fighting, but it's not one you should expect to win.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• subtome

  1 164 0.0 JavaScript

  A universal Subscribe/Follow button.

  

I think it covers 5. Could be extended a bit (especially if in the future there really exists a group with activity that can be presented as well), but it's awesome and very close!

2 was different. I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request and gives the user a way to subscribe directly via one of the many available feed reader, that would help a lot.

The idea is not completely novel, https://github.com/superfeedr/subtome goes into the direction but I think it is broken. A website carried by an independent group could be a solution. Maybe even something that could help in case browsers are open for some changes here, but don't want to create the UI part. Or when working on extending a CMS and instead of implementing that UI again, we use that mechanism to wrap the feed. As a web developer making it a website was probably an idea near to me, but there might be better solutions.

• RSSHub

  26 29,430 10.0 TypeScript

  🧡 Everything is RSSible

• worker-planet

  2 21 6.3 Handlebars

  Generate a single page (and feed) with content from multiple RSS/Atom sources. Runs on Cloudflare Workers.

I've never stopped using RSS, since it is so useful for many use cases. I've even recently built a tool, as an experiment, using it (https://github.com/dethos/worker-planet). Who remembers what a "planet" software is?

Fortunately we can still find many websites and services that provide RSS feeds (probably because the tool/framework they are built with, automatically provides that feature). Implementing it is not hard, but in the end I think the most important aspect of that list is `5.`, not a website in particular but creating awareness that this tech/tool exists and in what cases it can be useful.

• RSS-Bridge

  135 6,819 9.6 PHP

  The RSS feed for websites missing it

  

That's something I did implement in Pipes, but the API limit and API changes made it hard and I basically can't guarantee that it works. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge is an alternative you might like.

• temporary.chat-playbook

  5 11 2.6 Jinja

  Discontinued Ansible playbook to deploy chat server

used as an easy platform to diffuse content via rss (works for images too)

https://github.com/ba9f11ecc3497d9993b933fdc2bd61e5/temporar...

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• temporar

  1 - -

used as an easy platform to diffuse content via rss (works for images too)

https://github.com/ba9f11ecc3497d9993b933fdc2bd61e5/temporar...

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