[breck]

The future of RSS is "git clone".

RSS was invented in 1999, 6 years before git!

Now we have git and should just be "git cloning" blogs you like, rather than subscribing to RSS feeds.

I still have RSS feeds on all my blogs for back-compat, but git clone is way better.

[8organicbits]

What problems does that solve? Reading blogs over git clone sounds like re-inventing the wheel. Are there even any tools that do that?

If anything were to replace RSS (and Atom) I'd personally hope for h-feed [1] since it's DRYer. But realistically it's going to be hard to eclipse RSS, there's far too much adoption and it is mostly sufficient.

[1] https://indieweb.org/h-feed

[breck]

> What problems does that solve?

A million?

Having your own local copy of your favorite authors' collections is the absolute way to go. So much faster, searchable, transformable, resistant to censorship, et cetera.

[mananaysiempre]

> What problems does that solve? Reading blogs over git clone sounds like re-inventing the wheel.

Can’t say anything about blogs, but the kernel folks actively use mailing list archives over Git[1,2] (also over NNTP and of course mail is also delivered as mail).

[1] https://public-inbox.org/README.html

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/

[kevindamm]

I'm not the GP commenter, but I'm supposing there would be some way of announcing the git repo where you can find the source -- similar to the `<link...>` tag used for RSS, you could have a

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/x-git" title="my blog as a git repo" href="..." />

..and tooling could take care of all the things you like in an RSS reader. I could see this working really well for static site generators like vitepress or Jekyll or what have you, but going beyond what's in the source is kind of project-specific, but maybe I'm interested in just a summary of commits/PRs

Anyway, there isn't an official IANA-defined type for a git repo (the application/x-git is my closest guess until one became official) but my point is it isn't too far beyond what auto-discovery of RSS is.

I think the GP's comment is from the point of view of making it easy to retrieve the contents of the blog archive, easier than the hoops mentioned (bulk archive retrieval and generating WordPress page sequences, etc.) as well as solving the problem in TFA (partial feeds, partial blog contents in the feed).

[breck]

> <link rel="alternate" type="application/x-git" title="my blog as a git repo" href="..." />

This is a _great_ idea. Let's make this happen.

Edit: okay this is live now in Scroll and across PLDB, my blog, and other sites. Would love if someone could post this link to HackerNews: https://scroll.pub/blog/gitOverRss.html

[8organicbits]

I'd post the link, and I agree it's a cool idea, but the post looks like a pretty shallow rehashing of the thread.

[kevindamm]

I like it, I'm adding this <link> to my sites now, too

[breck]

Awesome! Any chance you could add some info about who you are to your HN profile? Would love to read your stuff. Clearly a mind full of good ideas!

[mfashby]

It's not what you're aiming for with this comment, but I bet git would actually make a pretty good storage tool/format for archival of mostly static sites.

horrible simple hack: use `wget` with `--mirror` option, and commit the result to a git repository. Repeat with a `cron` job to keep an archive with change history.

[breck]

I assume this is what wayback machine uses?

[Tomte]

Of course not. They have their own crawler (Heritrix, an open source Java crawler) and archive in WARC format. It‘s serious archiving, they want to preserve reply codes, HTTP headers etc.

[Tomte]

You clone what? A WordPress database?

[breck]

> You clone what? A WordPress database?

You clone static site generated websites.

Scroll is designed for this, but there's no reason other SSCs can't copy our patterns.

Here's a free command line working client you can try [beta]: https://wws.scroll.pub/readme.html

Instead of favoriting feeds, you favorite repos. Then you type "wws fetch" to update all your local repos.

It fetches the branch that contains the built artifacts along with the source, so you have ready to read HTML and clean source code for any transformations or analysis you want to do.

---

I love Wordpress, but the WordpressPHPMySQL stack is a drag. At some point I expect they will move the Wordpress brand, community, and frontend to be powered by a static site generator.

To be quite honest, I suspect they'll probably want to use Scroll as their new backend.

[xiande04]

And if the blog's repo is private or, gasp, it's not versioned with git?

[breck]

Then it's not worth reading.