91–99 of 99 posts
I used Yahoo! Pipes to help manage the firehouse part of RSS. I filtered on keywords, used it manage duplicates across feeds and a few other things. It would be great to have that kind of functionality in a reader. Bookmarked https://pipes.digital/ but haven’t yet played with it. Edit: fixed link
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. I use NetNewsWire and always paste in the main URL. Hunting down the rss link is not a thing.
Two things happened in my first week: - Using the iOS Safari share button to “Open in NetNewsWire” would silently fail if the blog didn’t have a feed. I went looking for my feeds later and they were missing. I tried a few more times before realizing, “oh, there’s just no feed.” - Some sites I found had multiple feed links (one per kind of post: long post, short fragments, photo posts). NetNewsWire would always pick t…
Side note: I kind of wish these “rss is back” posts that were referenced in this article contained “hey here’s my rss subscription list.” Because I’d like to learn about new cool stuff to subscribe to.
I like Inoreader[0]. The web app is plenty snappy for me, and supports basic vim nav keys, which is a lovely plus. The free plan's 150 feeds are sufficient for my use case. The mobile app also performs well. Mostly it just gets out of my way, which is all I really want. [0] https://www.inoreader.com
Nice writeup. I share a lot of these gripes, as someone who's also on the publishing side: it continues to surprise me how many people actually do read my blog via RSS (based on statistics passed back through user agents), given how poor the discovery and client experience is.
How are you tracking RSS reads? HTTP logs?
For example, here's a log from today:
8.29.198.27 - - [01/Jan/2023:00:04:42 -0500] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 99 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
Where I do have issues is why a lot of news, blogs and article sites fail to actually use them, or even use them in a inconsistent manner. I've rolled my own feed reader ( https://dragonc.droppages.com/ - dedicated to Boardgames) because no reader has actually managed to lay things out as I wanted. But in making my own I found there is so much inconsistency in how it's implemented. Well yes, there is a standard but it seems that a lot of vendors don't even bother handling things because RSS just isn't accepted in general use. Some sites don't even bother putting the title of their site in their feed.
Everybody rolls their own RSS feeds these days. yes, some Blog style sites have it automatically as a by-product of the platform. Yet other news sites just don't even bother assuming that you'll be reading their site anyway. And for those, you have to do some creative grep/sed/awk processing to get out the interesting articles for your feed reader.
I can about my workflow here: https://www.liamjbennett.me/posts/2022-12-23-workflow-2023/
I moved away from Feedly to Readwise Reader (https://readwise.io/read ) recently because not only does it help with the firehose it’s also pretty good at recommending other sites to follow.
I like Inoreader[0]. The web app is plenty snappy for me, and supports basic vim nav keys, which is a lovely plus. The free plan's 150 feeds are sufficient for my use case. The mobile app also performs well. Mostly it just gets out of my way, which is all I really want. [0] https://www.inoreader.com
btw, https://vimium.github.io/ would let u use vim navigation on any web page
The annoying thing with such solutions for webapps is when there is a more fluent implementation of navigation in the context of the application. With j/k bound to normal scrolling, I then have to resort to link-hinting to navigate among articles in the feed. With app-native navigation, these can jump among articles.
A good vim-binding experience is not just j/k for scrolling up and down (:
What if Firefox picked up the proverbial RSS feed torch and took it to the next level?