How do you, personally, receive notifications when people blog? | Hacker News Reader

How do you, personally, receive notifications when people blog?

6 pointsjamieweb13 comments

RSS, subscribe via email, IFTTT, just check the blog regularly, something else?

Absolutely RSS, my whole news consumption process depends on it, I hate polling for stuff. Thankfully, the vast majority of blogs still provide RSS, even if a bit hidden sometimes.

I even consume HN via RSS: I have separate RSS feeds for items that reach 50, 250 and 1000 points, respectively.

Interesting setup, which reader do you use?

Feedly, works pretty well for my use case (I heavily rely on the iOS app since I tend to read news while on the go).

I've not really looked at Feedly before - do you use a paid plan?

I use the free one but I’ve been using it for a long time so I’m grandfathered in the original free plan with unlimited sources. As of today I have ~500 feeds which I subscribe to, I think for new accounts the free limit is much lower.

~500 feeds! That must keep you busy!

I'm working on increasing subscriptions on my blog - do you frequently see the "Subscribe on Feedly" buttons, and if so do you use them? Or are they not useful?

Haha luckily most of those feeds are pretty inactive, maybe a post a month or so, which is exactly why RSS feeds are so essential, I can keep the pulse on a massive source of good content.

I don't think I'd use a "subscribe on feedly" button, typically I just copy and paste the URL into feedly and it automatically scrapes the RSS feed, if it exists. Sometimes I manually copy the RSS link directly from the website, when exposed.

Do you expect the RSS feed to contain the entire article so that you can read it all entirely within Feedly? Or does RSS only need to have a summary and then a link to the full article?

I know that some blogs put their full articles in the RSS feed, so you can just read it directly in your RSS viewer, email notification, etc. I've tried doing this too but since my blog is 100% bespoke PHP (i.e. it's not WordPress or some other big platform), it's not easy to do. When I write an article, I'm literally writing raw HTML with some included PHP functions to stick the navbar and footer on. It's not easy to get this into an RSS feed as you can imagine...

A brief summary is enough, I always jump from feedly into Chrome for the articles I'll read.

Thanks for your help with this. :)

Sadly on most cases there isn't much else to do than to check back every now and again.

Here's a product idea. A service that would automatically screen-scrape any URL of a blog (using heuristics and/or machine learning to figure out the layout and where the posts are) and then outputs an RSS feed.

Reeder.app on macOS and iOS.

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