I found RSS feeds to be the best remedy for my accelerated bit-sized dopamine-inducing news consumption.
RSS lets me focus on what I actually want to read, makes me take long-break (instead of short bursts of Twitter updates), and gives me longer and more structured content.
I also use RSS for sharing articles, by giving the URL of your Pocket RSS feed to friends.
I'm glad that, in the age of algorithmically curated timelines, RSS still exist!
I'd been on The Old Reader ever since Google Reader shut down. Tried Bazqux thanks to a post here on HN and switched because it's much faster. Very noticeable with a lot of subscriptions (I have over 100).
Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's "Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in comparison.
RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
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When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins.
Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts.
Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!
I wrote tweets2rss[1] and use it to turn my private lists into RSS feeds. For example, I have a feed in my RSS reader for interesting people (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc) and a list for interesting companies.
intertwingly.net! Now that brings back memories! Sam Ruby, Dave Winer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Tim Bray, Mark Pilgrim, Joe Clark. XML, DTDs, XML Schema, Relax NG, XSL, XSLT, FOP, CSS and XHTML! WaSP, micro formats (and XML-RPC, SOAP, and WSDL (pre-WS-Death Star). Oh, heady days!
Apologies for the pedantry, but a nit: It's Atom, not ATOM. It's not an acronym like RSS.
Once upon a time in the days of my youth, Sam linked to something I wrote, and seemed to approve or at least not completely think I was wrong. Made my entire month.
This brings back memories of the syndication-format wars.
And not good ones, either. RSS 0.9x versus RSS 1.0 versus RSS 2.0 versus Atom versus CDF versus whatever else people came up with, and which formats are relatively self-contained versus which ones had to go borrow elements from other XML namespaces and whether you should "helpfully" supplement your feed (or even your XHTML!) with stuff pulled from Dublin Core, which formats have associated publishing protocols that actually work, the mess of trying to fit arbitrary content formats into feeds and bumping into XML arcana along the way and encouraging people to put autodiscovery links in their sites and...
Thankfully, for many years now I've published only an Atom feed, and it works, and that's that. And for reading I use Reeder, with a paid service that tracks my subscriptions and read/unread status, and it seems to just work. That wasn't always the case.
If you haven’t tried RSS as your main mode of information consumption in a while, you should give it a shot. I went all-in on RSS recently and it’s been great. Way more thoughtful, long form content. Smaller dose information sources (Twitter, etc.) are useful in their own way, but I’ve found that the amount of time required to create a unit of media is a pretty good reverse indicator of how likely it is to use the baser emotions to acquire and keep my attention.
I've been using Newsboat (https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat) and Feeder (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ ) lately. I feel like I'm able to "cover" so much more news with these. It's just more efficient and focused for me, even though nothing is synced beyond the list of feeds (which I seem to only be adding or two every month). Next I need to re-think my usage of getpocket and newsletters, but the switch to relying more on RSS has been an overdue one.
I've had pretty good results subscribing to a few select Twitter feeds via RSS. Some people do put useful content on Twitter, but the Twitter UI makes it very difficult to identify and extract.
Yeah, it’s the same content. It’s just that if you switch to consuming it via RSS, you don’t get sucked into all the bite sized media that permeates the web.
I see, yes that makes sense. There's nothing that detracts from the reading experience more than an advertisement placed between two adjacent paragraph in s story. Even the moribund print news media doesn't do this.
Actually with the recent increased censorship and bans on reddit I left completely and switched RSS feeds read in a native client reader on my desktop (+voat, trying to make it better by being a good person and ignoring the rest). It helps that I never stopped cultivating them over the years though.
Have been using https://inoreader.com since the Year Google Reader closed, and imho, it's better than Feedly.
I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre-load everything for offline reading on mobile.
I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted solutions - whether server or client - as there is a greater chance someone is already aggregating a feed you might discover only some time in the future.
What makes it better than Feedly? I've been using Feedly since Google Reader closed and I think it pretty much nails this simple tool. How is it even possible to be much better?
The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community, while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate.
Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email
There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites and save web pages
Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year, while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since 2013
Ah, yeah, you're correct. Firefox had changed the permissions for this some time ago.
You can optionally toggle the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground value in about:config to true, then the v shortcut will open in background.
That said, I find the add-on a must-have. I'm always using it to save web pages. Do not forget to check the HTTPS option in setting, though.
As a reference [1]:
browser.tabs.loadInBackground => when you open a regular link in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab)
default = true, do not make the new tab active
In the Options dialog/page, this is controlled by the "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting.
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground => when you divert a script-generated new window to a new tab using Ctrl+click, or when a page uses the target attribute to launch a link in a new window and you divert it to a new tab
default = false, make the new tab active
browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground => when you load a bookmark in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab)
default = false, make the new tab active
I've been a Feedly user since GoogleReader shutdown and i've recently been working on my own news aggregator / rss reader because i wanted to have my rss feeds and also a GoogleNews-like view of the news of the day in the same app.
If you have some time to spare, i'd love to have your feedback!
Whenever I'm on slow internet I appreciate loading "mobilized content" - it will show you contents of the article right on the site. Also in general it felt a lot faster than feedly (left 2yrs ago though, feedly might've changed).
I've always had Feedly set to display the full article in the reader. It's been a feature since the day I switched from Google Reader. Is "mobilized content" different from that?
Not sure what Full article means since I wasn't on feedly for so long but I guess you mean only what the feed exposes to you (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss there's always only Comments link). But if I say mobilized content in inoreader it downloads the website, parses it and shows it to me https://i.imgur.com/b09hh6Y.png
How do you get "mobilized content" in Inoreader? My experience using both now is that Inoreader cuts off some of my longer feeds at the fold with a link to the site while Feedly displays the entire contents of every article.
I dropped Feedly for the most basic reason possible: it didn't display my feeds readably. I read a lot of math blogs and the TeX formulas in them didn't show up in Feedly (and maybe a few did appear but with incorrect spacing). Inoreader renders them just fine.
This was years ago, and back there was already a feature request on Feedly's website asking for this to be fixed. I just took a look at that request it looks exactly the same, so either they haven't done anything about this (most likely) or they fixed it but forgot to close the issue.
It's not just nice but necessary. I didn't give up Feedly because it was merely incovenient, but because I often couldn't understand a blog post without the formulas.
I just open the actual site when that happens, which makes the feature a convenience rather than a necessity. I can't remember the last time that happened to me though. If this were affecting me regularly I'd probably feel like you.
I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for.
Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day only to reviewing feed items.
I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I make it faster?
1. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way.
2. Deduplication
3. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest.
4. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I want.
... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using only above. What else can be done?
[0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds
The major feature here would be deduplication, in my opinion. That would be hard to do though as it would have to parse the feed contents (which vary from links to articles to full blow articles sometimes) and use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe? Curious if there is a smarter solution to that feature possibility.
FYI Inoreader does some deduplication by default. As you scroll you see a message like 'Filtered one similar article'. I haven't noticed any duplicates. That doesn't help when everyone's talking about the same thing, of course.
> use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe
That's the problem I intended to solve by 'grouping', as I called it: Don't delete the similar items, but group them together (see my GP comment regarding the functionality).
Also, it might not be as hard as it seems with this data. There would be maybe thousands of records (though you'd want it to scale higher); how many would have the same sets of proper nouns, for example, and not be about the same topic?
Stress from bolded lines of unread articles can be overwhelming.
In FeedDemon, a desktop based reader, there is a tool called the Panic button that is triggered when you have a lot of unreads (or that you can trigger manually). It displays the following message:
You have 591 unread articles. This isn't email - you don't have to read everything. Perhaps it's time to hit the panic button and let FeedDemon mark articles as read for you?
Then you can mark all articles older than say 48H or 5 days as read automatically.
As a basic feature you can group feeds and there is a button that let you mark all articles in a group (or a single feed) as read, so for chatty feeds you can just skim the titles and if nothing mandates further reading you can clear it up.
The real trick though for me is to revisit your RSS list regularly, say once a year, and not be afraid to remove or filter feeds that post too many articles. Some big blogs in their niche post several "news" pieces per day.
What was great was Yahoo Pipes, where you could filter, merge and transform feeds into new feeds. So you could grab a feed from a chatty blog and filter it on some keyword for the subniche you are interested in, then do that on several sources and merge all these into one consolidated feed.
Plug: I'm building a successor to Yahoo Pipes on https://www.pipes.digital, and this is a usecase I definitely want to support. Maybe give it a try? I'm always interested in feedback.
This so much. Never saw the appeal of web based readers. Been using a desktop based newsfeed for more than a decade.
And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter, etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are just a click away.
I built a tiny website back in 2005-ish to aggregate RSS feeds from sites that I was interested in. Just for myself and didn't think too much that it could have been an actual product. That was before Google Reader launching in October 2005. Today it's sad to see Google Reader discontinued.
Somehow I find this article very interesting in that it's kind of a sandwich that the promotion of Feedly is inserted in the middle, which makes me wonder if the article really wants to advocate the revival of RSS, or is just another marketing one. Does anyone have the same feeling here (confusing face)?
Edited: fixed a typo: Google Reader launched in October 2005.
Hi Tony, just to be clear, it is not a promotion for us, we've been interviewed as well as all the other readers and only a fraction of what we've been asked was published. We had no control to review how the final article will look like either. -Petr @ Feedly
Syndicated feeds (whether RSS or ATOM) are fabulous and are by far the best way to aggregate a wide variety of sources with a minimum of corporate surveillance. There aren't many that don't emit RSS/Atom or can't be coerced in some way (even Twitter with services such as https://twitrss.me/)
I implemented RSS on FWD:Everyone this past week (not deployed yet). It was super easy, didn't take more than a couple hours, and only required two or three extra lines of code for each endpoint.
I have no idea how much use it will get, but seemed like an important thing to.
I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don’t think this is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.
Yes. This might be a problem with software implementations but it's the reason why I don't use rss anymore. The anxiety caused by "There's 500000 unread items in your feeds"
I always found RSS/Atom most useful for following sources (usually personal blogs and podcasts) that post infrequently, but where every post is worth reading. Like Oona Räisänen's blog: http://www.windytan.com/
For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every couple of days and have stuff to read.
And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.
What do you mean by identify? Find them? Well, every way people find sites, from websearches that hit on a good post, links from other such sites, link aggregators, etc. I believe I got that one from Hackaday.
I dislike most RSS/Atom readers for the same reason. I made my own minimal reader for my personal use [1] that only groups entries together by date and displays a feed/title URL I can click on. My browser can remember which links I've read and which I haven't. I find it works really well, it does exactly what I want.
I spend a lot of time in Slack during the day, so I decided it should become my RSS reader. I created a dedicated team and used an RSS bot to subscribe. It works really well.
that's my ship on these vast oceans for 14 years now. every evening i open (now a beautiful macos reeder app) and depart on sailing as i see fit and where i want to. a treasure, rss feeds collected over the years, from compsc and programming related things, STEM, liberal arts, and several mischiefs.
If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1], feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP, since that gives better control than sending via SMTP.
I find that I'm far more able to manage information overload by doing the exact opposite and moving non-human email into a newsreader. Email is for people, not newsletters or notifications. If you can move as much of the non-automated stuff into feeds as possible, then email actually becomes useful again. Feedbin has a feature [0] where it gives you an email address that places anything received into a feed, for example.
And for anyone who still thinks that the T-bird project died long ago, look again ... it's been greatly improved for the past few years and an interface overhaul is in the works.
I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few make you use a search-engine to find out where).
I used to do that, but you're tied to Thunderbird that way and I don't recall it having syncing for RSS, either. With a cron job, you're free to use whatever clients you want across multiple devices, with free sync thanks to IMAP.
I subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds of more than 100 technical sites using Reeder, hosted by Inoreader for free. Overall it’s been a great experience. The only gripe I have is that many sites these days (especially small blogs) don’t have an RSS feed or have one that isn’t discoverable.
Hello founder of Panda here, you can use http://usepanda.com to read RSS as well. Right now you can add maximum 3 RSS feeds for free. With pro account you can add unlimited feeds. (It's as low as $2.99 per month) We're planning to start a Patreon campaign and our goal is to make all the premium features free for all the users as we reach our goals on the platform. As soon as we reach $2000 we'll make RSS feeds free for everyone. Hope you guys give it a try :)
Ive used it a bit, but i havent found any solution that can store about half a million aeticles without choking (even though my computer can handle it)
Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article.
But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article.
I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. Just, wow, this is a sorry state of affairs. Just give me the damn content and I'll be on my merry way.
I was trying and fell short of something witty to say.
But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion.
I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately.
TinyTinyRSS lets you use xpath to specify which element on the linked page is the “real” content. It was a life-saver when dealing with snippet-only feeds.
You charge for a hosted service. You also charge for a self-hosted tool. But you also offer an older (read: crappier) version of the same thing under AGPL.
I like the sound of the product, but there are too many red flags there.
This is my biggest gripe with RSS. Not the fault of the protocol, just the user experience.
I mostly consume my feeds on the London Underground, so offline reading is perfect for that, but I tend to have to scroll through articles that are truncated because there's no point in reading them.
You could argue that the infrastructure of the tube network is the problem, not the state of the modern web, but still, it sucks.
I had to write a Huginn agent that crawls my RSS and creates a private feed that then subsequently downloads the entire article, which I then can pump back into my reader. Sigh.
I've been using the same method for about 16 years thanks to Firefox. RSS toolbar feeds[0] have been supported since Firefox was in beta (Phoenix). I never did use Google Reader, I viewed that as for the kids! Came and went and I never paid any attention to it, didn't need it and I waited out its existence apparently.
RSS toolbar feeds are also the reason I never switched to Chrome, ever. Google never wanted anyone to have ad-free RSS feeds catch on when they could potentially prevent a site visit.
For my iOS solution, I use Feedly by simply subscribing to the same sources as I do in Firefox. Not much else is necessary. Other than picking up Feedly for mobile, same tool all this time.
So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM), category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule, DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own voice attached called Talk about News - https://talkabout.co.in/
Sharing news along with voice was the USP, so that the shared content gets more value. While working on this, we saw that not every site followed RSS/ATOM standards we had to individually handle different sites for the shortcomings. I'm certain that, though Feedly started as RSS aggregator they are now parsing the sites as a whole for content for the same reasons.
By the time we built and released it, we understood Facebook has become the defacto news consumption source and without big marketing budget; our project was dead as soon as it arrived. We tried to salvage the tech and re-brand it as 'build your own app'for bloggers, but it didn't take off.
But we did take the voice sharing feature from TaN to another product called larynx, as we understood the 'News' in the name of Talk about News was one of the main inhibitors for downloads.
Note: If any of you tried the app and if didn't work as expected; my apologies as the app hasn't been actively developed for years now & the website exists only for historical reasons.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 402 ms ] threadRSS lets me focus on what I actually want to read, makes me take long-break (instead of short bursts of Twitter updates), and gives me longer and more structured content.
I also use RSS for sharing articles, by giving the URL of your Pocket RSS feed to friends.
I'm glad that, in the age of algorithmically curated timelines, RSS still exist!
The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2]
[1] http://bazqux.com [2] https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb
[1] https://theoldreader.com/
Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's "Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in comparison.
RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
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When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins.
Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts.
Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!
As far as Twitter goes, I use TwitRSS to generate RSS feeds from of a couple of users. https://twitrss.me/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170914094626/http://www.intert...
Apologies for the pedantry, but a nit: It's Atom, not ATOM. It's not an acronym like RSS.
I miss those crazy idealistic days.
Adding Atom support to anything is trivial even without using a library, and there is a good schema for validating feeds: http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/atom-validation.htm
And not good ones, either. RSS 0.9x versus RSS 1.0 versus RSS 2.0 versus Atom versus CDF versus whatever else people came up with, and which formats are relatively self-contained versus which ones had to go borrow elements from other XML namespaces and whether you should "helpfully" supplement your feed (or even your XHTML!) with stuff pulled from Dublin Core, which formats have associated publishing protocols that actually work, the mess of trying to fit arbitrary content formats into feeds and bumping into XML arcana along the way and encouraging people to put autodiscovery links in their sites and...
Thankfully, for many years now I've published only an Atom feed, and it works, and that's that. And for reading I use Reeder, with a paid service that tracks my subscriptions and read/unread status, and it seems to just work. That wasn't always the case.
I do wish I could have an easier time getting YouTube playlists in there[1], but video is really the only sore spot there.
[1]: Playlists will now only give the top n videos in a playlist, so you basically have to follow a channel feed instead.
[1]https://podsync.net/
Isn't RSS the same content as on the publishers page or site though? Maybe I am misinterpreting you comment?
They’re complementary services, not competition. Reddit supports the RSS standard.
I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre-load everything for offline reading on mobile.
I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted solutions - whether server or client - as there is a greater chance someone is already aggregating a feed you might discover only some time in the future.
Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email
There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites and save web pages
Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year, while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since 2013
You can optionally toggle the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground value in about:config to true, then the v shortcut will open in background.
That said, I find the add-on a must-have. I'm always using it to save web pages. Do not forget to check the HTTPS option in setting, though.
As a reference [1]:
browser.tabs.loadInBackground => when you open a regular link in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = true, do not make the new tab active In the Options dialog/page, this is controlled by the "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting.
browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground => when you divert a script-generated new window to a new tab using Ctrl+click, or when a page uses the target attribute to launch a link in a new window and you divert it to a new tab default = false, make the new tab active
browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground => when you load a bookmark in a new tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = false, make the new tab active
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1066419
This was years ago, and back there was already a feature request on Feedly's website asking for this to be fixed. I just took a look at that request it looks exactly the same, so either they haven't done anything about this (most likely) or they fixed it but forgot to close the issue.
Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day only to reviewing feed items.
I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I make it faster?
1. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way.
2. Deduplication
3. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest.
4. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I want.
... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using only above. What else can be done?
[0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds
That's the problem I intended to solve by 'grouping', as I called it: Don't delete the similar items, but group them together (see my GP comment regarding the functionality).
Also, it might not be as hard as it seems with this data. There would be maybe thousands of records (though you'd want it to scale higher); how many would have the same sets of proper nouns, for example, and not be about the same topic?
In FeedDemon, a desktop based reader, there is a tool called the Panic button that is triggered when you have a lot of unreads (or that you can trigger manually). It displays the following message:
You have 591 unread articles. This isn't email - you don't have to read everything. Perhaps it's time to hit the panic button and let FeedDemon mark articles as read for you?
Then you can mark all articles older than say 48H or 5 days as read automatically.
As a basic feature you can group feeds and there is a button that let you mark all articles in a group (or a single feed) as read, so for chatty feeds you can just skim the titles and if nothing mandates further reading you can clear it up.
The real trick though for me is to revisit your RSS list regularly, say once a year, and not be afraid to remove or filter feeds that post too many articles. Some big blogs in their niche post several "news" pieces per day.
What was great was Yahoo Pipes, where you could filter, merge and transform feeds into new feeds. So you could grab a feed from a chatty blog and filter it on some keyword for the subniche you are interested in, then do that on several sources and merge all these into one consolidated feed.
And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter, etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are just a click away.
Somehow I find this article very interesting in that it's kind of a sandwich that the promotion of Feedly is inserted in the middle, which makes me wonder if the article really wants to advocate the revival of RSS, or is just another marketing one. Does anyone have the same feeling here (confusing face)?
Edited: fixed a typo: Google Reader launched in October 2005.
What were they thinking? Under no circumstances am I installing either of their apps on my phone.
I have no idea how much use it will get, but seemed like an important thing to.
For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every couple of days and have stuff to read.
And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.
[1] http://magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader/ - in case anyone is interested in what it looks like
[1] https://github.com/agorf/feed2email
[2] https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap
[3] https://github.com/zsau/feedmail
[0] https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...
I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few make you use a search-engine to find out where).
But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article.
I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. Just, wow, this is a sorry state of affairs. Just give me the damn content and I'll be on my merry way.
But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion.
I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately.
So here we are.
RSS revival? Bring it on. I'll play drums.
You charge for a hosted service. You also charge for a self-hosted tool. But you also offer an older (read: crappier) version of the same thing under AGPL.
I like the sound of the product, but there are too many red flags there.
I mostly consume my feeds on the London Underground, so offline reading is perfect for that, but I tend to have to scroll through articles that are truncated because there's no point in reading them.
You could argue that the infrastructure of the tube network is the problem, not the state of the modern web, but still, it sucks.
I use Newsify with my Feedly account on the iPhone, and it’s perfect. Android clients are also available (sorry, can’t remember names).
Edit: and no tracking.
Also, I think it might be tiered and not all benefits apply at the lowest tier but all of them should be reasonably priced for anyone in tech.
RSS toolbar feeds are also the reason I never switched to Chrome, ever. Google never wanted anyone to have ad-free RSS feeds catch on when they could potentially prevent a site visit.
For my iOS solution, I use Feedly by simply subscribing to the same sources as I do in Firefox. Not much else is necessary. Other than picking up Feedly for mobile, same tool all this time.
[0]https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png
So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM), category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule, DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own voice attached called Talk about News - https://talkabout.co.in/
Sharing news along with voice was the USP, so that the shared content gets more value. While working on this, we saw that not every site followed RSS/ATOM standards we had to individually handle different sites for the shortcomings. I'm certain that, though Feedly started as RSS aggregator they are now parsing the sites as a whole for content for the same reasons.
By the time we built and released it, we understood Facebook has become the defacto news consumption source and without big marketing budget; our project was dead as soon as it arrived. We tried to salvage the tech and re-brand it as 'build your own app'for bloggers, but it didn't take off.
But we did take the voice sharing feature from TaN to another product called larynx, as we understood the 'News' in the name of Talk about News was one of the main inhibitors for downloads.
larynx (PH) - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx
Note: If any of you tried the app and if didn't work as expected; my apologies as the app hasn't been actively developed for years now & the website exists only for historical reasons.