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Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

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Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#211
post #185

For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. For iOS I use Reeder ( https://reederapp.com ) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit ( https://readkitapp.com/ ). Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one…

> For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

Interesting, I also migrated to feedly but I do use the web application on the desktop, though the feedly app on my phone. On desktop, the webapp works really well for my purposes — which is mostly going through all updates (all sorted by oldest, "j" for next), and once in a while opening one in a full browser window ("v") or sending the page to instapaper.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. I thought you were going to say that it needs to be a website+mobile app for maximum adoption, and I was ready to say that you have a point but full-weight desktop apps still have their place. Then I looked up FreshRSS, and it's an aggregator that you host yourself? Any answer to the question "how can we get more regular users to adopt a service"…

Isn't Apache installed by default on at least all desktops nowadays? Obviously, people should be expected to tinker with httpd.conf, but something fully automated running on top of Apache isn't beyond imagination - and the installation could even be handled automatically if required.

When you say all desktops, are you including Windows and OSX in this?

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#213

Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat https://newsboat.org/ to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way. I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid. Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and W…

It all depends on what you are doing with RSS. If you subscribe to feeds who barf out 1000 new articles every hour, then a proper filter-system is a basic neccessary, and machine learning can help there. But I don't know whether this reader is using it for this.

Reading the github, it's seems also kinda questionable why they use multiple databases and services. That gives the impressioen that selfhosting this reader will be a pain. I guess I stay with Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/) for the moment.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#214
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Apache installed by default on at least all desktops nowadays? Obviously, people should be expected to tinker with httpd.conf, but something fully automated running on top of Apache isn't beyond imagination - and the installation could even be handled automatically if required.

Is Apache installed by default on Windows and MacOS? I find that very hard to believe :) Also, regular users tinkering with httpd.conf? Really?

It is on MacOS. And read my comment again - I agree that expecting users to tinker with httpd.conf is ridiculous.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#215
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome. Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional. [1] https://miniflux.net/

Since I'm considering to switch from TTRSS to something else, may I drill a bit? (the website is a tad short) I heavily rely on nested categories in TTRSS (Youtube -> News for news channels for example), while the website says it has categories, can they be nested? And most importantly, does miniflux handle about 700 feeds well? It would help a lot if I could lower the update rate of some feeds that only update once…

No nested categories. They're all flat. Miniflux is ultra minimalist and "opinionated," which I ended up preferring to all the others. YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

It's also wicked fast, resource-light, and the code is really easy to grok if you want to hack in anything. But, the update rate is a single global setting[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it could handle far more than 700 feeds... you'll hit bottlenecks from bandwidth or the DB before anything with the app.

[1]: http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#216
post #185

For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. For iOS I use Reeder ( https://reederapp.com ) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit ( https://readkitapp.com/ ). Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one…

I use FetchRSS to generate feeds for the odd ones [1].

[1]: http://fetchrss.com/

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#218

I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite. TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem. One of the…

> Every service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter.

To me Twitter is an RSS feed—at least this is the way I use it.

Re: Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

#220
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This dreary state of affairs is due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the entire file containing all posts the author would like to make public, regardless of how many are new to the reader. This insanely unnecessary bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete posts. (The single RSS file on my blog takes up the majority of my bandwidth costs.) Still, excep…

You should already be able to implement this using the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. The server only needs to send you back articles in the RSS feed that have been added after that date. The If-Modified-Since value is meant to come from the previous responses Last-Modified (not a timestamp you make up), so that side-steps timezone issues.

I think that still requires a change to both the server and the reader - although at least not a new standard.
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