The 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!
Explain what you mean by "objectively better"? Your response makes it sound like you don't know the difference and are doing it because everybody else does it. It also makes it sounds like you don't understand the difference between open source software and free software. Both are free licenses, open source is just one part of it.
The main difference is that GPL3 is a copyleft license, whereas MIT is not. Meaning that legally there is nothing in the license preventing a company from taking your code and using it for their purposes without having to contribute to improve the code.
i know the difference. i use gpl3 in my other project lue for example. i meant objectively better for the open source community. the spread of new ideas benefits from the mit license because the ideas in the code can travel farther.
the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now. the tech isn't mainstream, and big companies are trying to squash it since it doesn't drive engagement like the infinite scroll. anything that helps rss move forward is a win, and the mit license makes that easier.
> the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now.
I don't think another client is the solution, just saying. There's about three billion of them out there (though I don't dispute that yours might have something unique).
The 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.
Love it. It’s funny how we are now building modern tools just to try and get back that simple 'Palm Pilot morning read' vibe.
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
Incidentally, I built my own calm RSS reader some time ago that has many similar ideas to yours: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
https://newsboat.org/
The best RSS reader program I have been using for years
nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
Nice work, I did mine in C, using Termbox2, in a very suckless fashion (config.h & make install)
I like the idea of the daily digest.
That gave me a good chuckle:
Consider having a shortcut to load a feed item's comments in the browser, if that's not already there.Why MIT and not GPL3?
why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!
Explain what you mean by "objectively better"? Your response makes it sound like you don't know the difference and are doing it because everybody else does it. It also makes it sounds like you don't understand the difference between open source software and free software. Both are free licenses, open source is just one part of it.
The main difference is that GPL3 is a copyleft license, whereas MIT is not. Meaning that legally there is nothing in the license preventing a company from taking your code and using it for their purposes without having to contribute to improve the code.
i know the difference. i use gpl3 in my other project lue for example. i meant objectively better for the open source community. the spread of new ideas benefits from the mit license because the ideas in the code can travel farther.
the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now. the tech isn't mainstream, and big companies are trying to squash it since it doesn't drive engagement like the infinite scroll. anything that helps rss move forward is a win, and the mit license makes that easier.
Ok thank you for explaining.
> the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now.
I don't think another client is the solution, just saying. There's about three billion of them out there (though I don't dispute that yours might have something unique).