Hacker News Reader

Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

BUT... the server (at least in Google Reader case) actually plays a crucial role - it "caches" the RSS feeds, so if you subscribe to some, you can see the history of the feed, i.e. the older articles, which are already not listed in the actual RSS file. This is an important part of the RSS reader functionality - without the server, you will not have that history (unless I am missing something).

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Well, you do have to leave the extension running, but it does the same thing. As mentioned on the site, this has the benefit of offline reading capability because the rss content is saved locally. If the feed in question only contains links or a synopsis this is not much help, but for feeds which contain the full article it can be very nice. I'd also like to integrate readability.js to cache a readable version of the link for feeds which do not contain the full article.

But the comment was talking about the previous entries of the RSS feed. For example, if I subscribe to some feed today, do I see entries published in the past? Like for example one year ago. If yes, how it is achieved?

Because in the Google Reader, when you subscribed to some blog feed, you could usually see the list of all articles published since the creation of that blog.

But with Reader, I could subscribe to a RSS feed and see the posts from 5 years ago, before I even knew the site existed. THAT's what I miss about Google Reader - not the reader itself, but the archive of data it provided. (I've since switched to NewsBlur)

That doesn't work for the use case where I go on holiday for a week and want to catch up when I get back.

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