This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
rafterydj · 10m ago
I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
aa-jv · 15s ago
I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
charcircuit · 22m ago
>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still require an aggregate to turn those feeds into a singular feed.
giancarlostoro · 11m ago
I was going to say, RSS is not as big as I remember it being back in the late 2000s. I remember people having RSS clients, myself included. Now I can't remember the last time I ever used one. Where RSS is most prominent I guess is podcast feeds which were based on RSS to my understanding.
PeterStuer · 30m ago
And then Google and Facebook killed RSS.
latexr · 12m ago
RSS is alive and well. It’s rare that I find an interesting website where RSS makes sense and it doesn’t exist. Even if they don’t advertise it, popping the website’s address into a feed reader tends to be enough to find it. Even Mastodon and Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds.
zenmac · 21m ago
One can say that, but can you really kill RSS when it is protocol? It is an easier way to keep track of all the updates from different sites.
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
Semiapies · 22m ago
My having to prune my subscriptions says otherwise.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still require an aggregate to turn those feeds into a singular feed.
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.