RSS: there's nothing better

I still derive significant value from Usenet.

People keep saying that IRC is dead (because Slack) or that Jabber is dead (because Slack) but I use both of those daily.

It's a big Internet, there's room for lots of stuff.

That's why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves the truncated RSS articles problem.

Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds.

I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows this instead.

I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads and removes any "non-content-related" stuff. I also convinced some of them to share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of "clean, ad-free" content beats anything else.

Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions, notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall...

In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can do that, you have your own RSS reader.

Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand how to convert the 'link' in the RSS feed to a 'mobile link'.

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