Ctrl.blog

Google hasn’t turned Chrome into a feed reader, but it does use Atom and RSS feeds to let visitors follow any website. Here are more details on how it works.

A brief history of where news/syndication feeds (“RSS“) went wrong, and how Google Chrome might just have found the right place for it in the Chrome web browser.

Superfeedr tried securing its website with HTTPS and HSTS, but failed to apply it correctly. User emails and credentials are sent in plain-text on the first login.

Google FeedBurner (the RSS enhancer and analytics suite) hasn’t received much attention in the last decade. Google now deprecates feed-to-email and more features.

Tweak the HTTP response body with regex substitutions. Apache HTTPD configuration example shows changing the URL tracking parameters in a syndication feed file.

Plain text isn’t HTML. Many clients decode it as XML and then strip away the resulting HTML anyway. The spec is clear, but many implementations are buggy.

I tried and succeeded in fighting back against news feed (‘RSS’) content scrapers by slightly delaying the publication of my feeds.

I listen to podcasts at my desk, and Pocket Casts’ new desktop apps (based on their web apps) means I don’t need my smartphone to enjoy them comfortably.

The new Google Podcast app doesn’t play well with other podcast apps. It doesn’t support some podcast standards, or importing or exporting subscriptions.

Your list of news feed (‘RSS’) subscriptions is unique and it can be used to create a trackable and persistent device fingerprint.

Create a URL transition-plan and create redirects for old URLs. Take a few minutes to avoid losing traffic when you move domain names or reorganize your URLs.

Five best practices to reduce bandwidth requirements for feeds (Atom/RSS). Tips for reader and publisher implementations.

Feed delta updates strip away feed entries that the subscriber has already download and only transmits the update delta consisting of new entries.

Reduce the bandwidth cost of your WordPress news feeds (‘RSS’) using Feed Deltas. Only deliver what’s changed since the subscriber last pulled the feed.

A bug in the Apple News crawler caused it to get stuck in a loop sending 100+ requests/second to websites with HTTPS certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.

The New Tab Pages (NTP) in web browsers used to be blank pages. Today, there’s a rush to bring you news and other content to the NTP.

Sleipnir auto-discovers news feeds (‘RSS’) from your most visited websites and curates a personal news feed on its New Tab Page (NTP).