Hacker News: tjansen

New comment by tjansen in "Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died"

tjansen — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:20:01 +0000

Damn. I've loved Bob and his writings ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid. He went through some crazy shit over the last few years (lost his house, almost blind). And when he started blogging again this year (https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...), the stories got even worse (lost his son, heart attack, stroke). RIP.

New comment by tjansen in "My website runs a curated RSS feed of critical film finance news"

tjansen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:14:36 +0000

There are services that do this, like OpenRSS, but I don't think they are intended for websites offering a RSS feed. You should do that with whatever software you use to create the HTML.

New comment by tjansen in "RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)"

tjansen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:08:45 +0000

Typically only with whitelisted URLs/hosts.

New comment by tjansen in "RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)"

tjansen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:07:34 +0000

Well, it's downread.com, still in beta, but very usable and nearly feature-complete. Not sure what else to say. I strive to make it better than the competition :) HTML/Styles is one aspect. I am not aware of any other RSS reader that supports styles in articles as well. Downread even supports CSS, CMS-specific CSS classes, Tailwind, and custom styling for difficult, popular feeds.

Regarding the habit... I don't know, doing it forever. Whenever I have a moment to read, I open it. Before Downread, it was Feedly, and before Feedly, Google Reader, and before Google Reader, I don't know, some desktop app. It's pretty much the only way I read, and I read a lot.

New comment by tjansen in "RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)"

tjansen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:40:10 +0000

As the author of an RSS reader, I would agree with most of that article, except the HTML / Styling section. It is full of misleading information.

1. You can use CSS, but expect that most readers will completely ignore it. Even widespread ones, like Feedly. Those that do support it will only offer a small subset, like text styles. No layout styles (positioning or flex-layouts), often not even colors. If you want to try the capabilities of your reader, this is a test feed: https://test-rss.downread.com/styles.rss.xml

2. Don't just prefer inline CSS, use it, because any sane RSS reader will filter