RSS and Atom feeds are back online.
Originally, we thought RSS and ATOM feeds were a bit of a dead standard, only used by bots to hijack articles (very badly) and post them on their own site as original content. However, a lot of people have moved beyond this method of theft and instead just let AI do it for them. We're turning it back on. Why? Because with the whole webring resurgence, there's also a bit of demand to have some level of interconnectivity. Thus, it comes back online.
Client time: How does RSS work?
If you have ever loaded a fresh copy of Windows 11 onto your desktop. Or, you had a default loaded android phone and swiped to the left. Some applications show different news articles, current events, or whatever slop the corporation that built your software/phone wanted to show you. Those articles are "Feeds." Little snippets of data to entice the reader to click and interact with them. The reason why your typical reader has not heard much about the RSS protocol is that people have not found out about it. They could customize their own feeds instead of letting a company monopolize screenspace with whatever feeds they were paid to show you.
RSS was designed to be a frictionless protocol to help your devices get the latest content from multiple points. It just about faded from the existence of modern apps and browsers in part because corporations had their own variant built right into phones. Why would you go to the hassle of programming sites you care about when you get all of your news from Fox, CNN, and MSNBC? To which RSS could be making a comeback because it's now the news agencies that generate the fiction between the reader and the content. Suddenly, there's value in taking a step back from these 'new-entertainment' sites and finding other places to fill your feed timeline with.
Disclaimer time: We wouldn't compare ourselves with a news agency. Don't have the manpower for starters. And believe it or not, we still have our souls.
The Clients:
FreshRSS
FressRSS(Clearnet) is great for people who self-host and/or own their own web server because it collects all of the feeds and presents them to a webpage instead of having to trust/load applications onto any device. This isn't the most turn-key application out there, as you will be customizing it to work with your server. The other reason why we recommended their site is that they also have a giant table of possible RSS clients that can be used. We're just going to focus on the ones we've tested. But their list (Clearnet) of every application out there is awesome.
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire (Clearnet) is crazy rare for the Apple Phone/iOS scene, just for the sake of its open source. There are a lot of RSS feed clients on Apple Store, but many of them inject their own ads. My only criticism of this application is that upon installation, it autoloads your app with a bunch of feeds. Which we guess is a nice way of seeing how it works and how feeds are setup but kind of annoying to tap-hold and delete all of them too.
It doesn't load up the webpage thumbnail as a graphic, but it gets the job done. We also like the fact that it has 'reader' mode. For sites like ours, it will continue after the limitation by visiting the site and completing all of the data for you to read the entire article on the phone.
Feeder
Feeder(Clearnet) for Android is NOT on the list that was provided by FressRSS because we found this on the F-Droid(Clearnet) Repository. For those who don't want to play with other people's repositories, it's now available on Google Play as well (took a while to get there!). It's open source and is generally our go-to RSS Feed reader for Android.
As you can see, it's very pretty because it gives you the same vibe Google News gives you with pictures and 2-3 sentences. With Feedly you have to do another click to activate reader mode. But it is by far our favorite RSS reader for the small web.
Client usage.
Most webmasters should either have an icon or a link pointing to where their RSS is. In some cases, like those who are using Jekyll. The webmaster may not even be AWARE they have an RSS feed going! Generally, a way of guessing a feed is seeing if the feed.xml is on the root of their website.
example:
http://www.rando-website-here.zzz/feed
Now, feed could mean a directory, like how we have it set up. Or it could also be feed.xml, thus you may need to add an XML at the end. Of course, it doesn't hurt to just ask the web-admin of that site where their RSS is.
Many RSS Feed client applications are quick to tell you if it's a valid RSS link or not.
Donate to open source.
We feel we shouldn't have to say this. But be sure to donate to these developers who do open-source projects. Even if you give them $1-5 for a coffee. That's great! If everyone gave these devs 1-5 bucks, there would be a lot of happy developers making ethical software that improves the ecosystem of your computing world, rather than the scheming dickheads that want to cram ads every time you click on a widget.
Where is the RSS/ATOM now?
- RSS 2.0 Format - here or here - they are both the same.
- RSS 0.92 Format - here.
- RDF/RSS 1.0 Format - here.
- ATOM Format - here.
JSON feed?
Although not really a part of the CMS engine. We used a plugin to add it here. Now you can keep track of when we post something in whatever app you want. We feel the RSS modules are a little on the noisy side. But whatever. It's just text at this stage.
Addressing the dark mirrors.
Does RSS support ALT-Nets such as Tor/I2P? It should! We were able to access those through the clients. It's just a matter of whatever RSS reader you are using; you access them. That's about it, really. We're sure there might be some ID issues with our JSON files. But the addresses relating to the article should be okay, as often you will be typing the domain address as the initial start point.
ROBOTS.TXT
While we are at it. Minus well TRY to give some rules to search engines to prevent repeatable content from being indexed. If they don't listen well, that's their own damned fault!
User-agent: * Disallow: */feed/*
To those who are concerned, How we disabled RSS and ATOM in WordPress in the past.
For those wondering how we told WordPress to stop RSS and ATOM feeds initially. Or are not as easily convinced as we are that RSS is alive and well through the surge of small websites. This is what we did to our function.php within the child theme of our site to kill WordPress internal RSS functionality:
// Disable RSS feeds.
function disable_feeds() {
wp_redirect( home_url() );
die;
}
// Disable global RSS, RDF & Atom feeds.
add_action( 'do_feed', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
add_action( 'do_feed_rdf', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
add_action( 'do_feed_rss', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
add_action( 'do_feed_rss2', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
add_action( 'do_feed_atom', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
// Disable comment feeds.
add_action( 'do_feed_rss2_comments', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
add_action( 'do_feed_atom_comments', 'disable_feeds', -1 );
// Prevent feed links from being inserted in the <head> of the page.
add_action( 'feed_links_show_posts_feed', '__return_false', -1 );
add_action( 'feed_links_show_comments_feed', '__return_false', -1 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );
As mentioned at the start of this article. The reason why we initially turned off RSS and ATOM in WordPress is that we thought the protocol was totally dead, with the only ones using it being bots that would jack the content of your website and post it at their own. We reversed our decision, finding out that there is actually a use for RSS within the small web community, as it's a means for people who give a shit about what you type can still keep up with you.
UNLIKE a lot of the small-web RSS feeds. We put a limit on how much you can read through RSS before you have to click on our site. This isn't because we want clicks. This is more or less a compromise we made to make the job of a scraper bot a little more annoying. Also, if we don't get your attention in the first paragraph of our article, then shame on fucking us.
That is what server said.
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Welcome to the Matrix
Aww! Being welcomed to the matrix! So sweet! Thank you!
- S