Lo-Fi Python

RSS Is Thriving: Working With RSS Python Tools

There have been countless obituaries about RSS on the internet, like when Dan McKinley wrote that "Google Reader Killed RSS". For sure, the existence of Google Reader had an impact on other readers gaining a wider audience before it was shut down by Google. This likely did have a suppressive impact on the adoption of RSS.

"Whatever happened to RSS?" is a question that murmurs thorugh the internet. The answer: it's still here and it's not going anywhere. I propose that RSS is not dead, but quietly regaining its strength and is on track to relevancy again. But did it actually fall off?

Did you know? RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication".

Some say with the rise of social media and email newsletters, RSS is not worth the time. That's precisely what the social media and search engine giants want so you'll stay in their walled garden platform. Google killed Google Reader because it is not in their interests to support a syndication format that cuts out their search engine middleman role. Nonetheless, we only need to consciously choose to use RSS to bring it back to prominence. Who's with me?!

"RSS readers have not only survived in the era of social media, but are driving more and more attention back to themselves, as people are realizing the pitfalls"

- Brian Barrett. "It's Time for an RSS Revival". Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader

You'll often hear the term "aggregator" or "reader" when dealing with RSS, which both mean "tool that collects multiple RSS feeds into single readable format". There are plenty of free RSS reader websites to keep up with new material from your favorite websites. Currently, I use Feeder to keep up with the blogs I follow. Their free plan allows you to follow up to 200 RSS feeds for free. Feedly is a commonly suggested RSS reader also.

A Few Benefits of RSS

• Receive notice when a new post is published by your favorite websites and blogs.

• The personal data of your readers is not collected.

• An RSS subscription is less intrusive compared to blasting into someone's cluttered email inbox. Plus you won't end up in the spam folder.

• Diversify your website's traffic to be less dependent on search engines and social media platforms.

  To know approximately how much RSS traffic you have, check how many HTTP requests have an XML content type. This blog post has a good breakdown of this HTTP based approach. Typically, 3-5% of total HTTP requests on my blog have XML content type, indicating RSS traffic.

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import feedparser

feed = "https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/atom10.xml"
d = feedparser.parse(feed)
print(d['feed']['title'])
print(d.feed.published)

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import feedparser

# https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/bozo.html#detecting-a-non-well-formed-feed
feed = "http://feedparser.org/tests/illformed/rss/aaa_illformed.xml"
d = feedparser.parse(feed)
# d.bozo: An integer, either 1 or 0. Set to 1 if the feed is not well-formed XML, and 0 otherwise.
print(d.bozo)
if d.bozo:
    exc = d.bozo_exception
    # Print bozo error message.
    print(exc.getMessage())
    # Print line number where exception occurred.
    print(f"Error at line {exc.getLineNumber()}")
else:
    print("Feed is well-formed RSS.")

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# Validate an RSS feed.
python -m webbrowser -t "https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https://example.com/feeds/all.rss.xml"

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import atoma
import requests

response = requests.get("https://example.com/feed.atom")
feed = atoma.parse_atom_bytes(response.content)
print(feed.title.value)