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Posts Tagged: rss

Behind the ATprotocol design

10/20/2024 6:57 pm

(I'm still working on properly generating Bluesky embeds automatically, so I'm just linking to it and posting a screenshot for now.)

This thread was an interesting look at some of the thinking that lead to the ATprotocol (the underlying system for Bluesky) decisions.

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10/10/2024 4:40 pm

I've been a longtime user of FreshRSS, my self-hosted RSS feed reader. However, for the last few years, it hasn't been automatically updating. Today, I finally figured it out myself. And there was much rejoicing.

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You Need Feeds

10/4/2024 9:55 am

I love my RSS feed reader. I currently pull in over 170 sites and have them fed to me. It's a wide array of content from tech blogs and current events to art and comics. I'm in a constant hunger for new things to add to it.

Someone turned me to this site which comes with a number of "starter pack" OPML files, which are XML files you can import into your feed reader and add any number of new feeds for you to get fed.

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Online Echoes & My Need for Short Term RSS Filters

1/3/2024 11:30 am

There's an almost yo-yo / echoing effect as people hear about something, then the time it takes them to make their content about it, before it then circulates again. And being as deeply online, I tend to be more aware of it as I see things very early and quickly, before they spread broadly. It's obviously reminiscient of traditional media, something happens, local news highlights it, then state news, then national, etc. Online is less directional, and more of a chaotic bounce between spheres people might see it or interact with it.

I posted about the kid beating Tetris on December 23rd. We're more than 2 weeks past that, and it's continuing to circulate and be reposted on various sites. An article about him on techspot.com is now in the top posts on Reddit for the day.

This echo is added to by the platforms which derive attention for upvotes / likes. I may already have seen something, but it still brings me joy, so I upvote it again. So perhaps Reddit and other platforms worsen this echo and noise.

For some things, this is an example of why I so badly want an RSS reader which has short term filtering built in. Once I see the Tetris story get a second post, I could add a short term filter and any posts which use the selected keyword(s) would be hidden. Ideally the feature would allow either a definite timeout (X days), or even better, how long since the last filtering. So if a post doesn't appear in my feed after, say, 3 days, the filter would expire.

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My 2023 RSS Feed (Mostly)

12/31/2023 8:29 pm

So I exported the list of sites I currently subscribe to in my RSS reader. It's nearly 200, though I removed a few from this list for various reasons (internal tech being the main one.)

This list is going to be of questionable quality. I'm not diving deep on each link, in most cases, the descriptive text after the link is what the blog itself provided to my RSS reader when it got imported. Many of these will be idle, or may even be broken links (though I've tried to remove those.) I don't remove blogs which go idle because they may one day begin publishing content again.

Additionally, the categorizations are very rough. There are countless examples of how I could reorganize things. The reality is I don't use the categories in my reader. I just skim through my full feed regardless of category. I am maintaining them here as they do provide a little additional context for links.

With those caveats said, I'm sharing here for posterity and as a resource for people looking for RSS feeds to subscribe to.

Blogs

Comics

Government

Magazines

News

Newsletters

Ones which link to the homepages, etc. are most likely managed through kill-the-newsletter.com, which lets you create inboxes, and then provides emails to that address as an RSS feed. Highly recommended.

Science

Seattle

Sports

Substack

Tech

Uncategorized

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Reddit Blackout - Day 1

6/12/2023 5:48 am

The Reddit blackout is upon us... what do we do?

Reddit had truly become the frontpage of the Internet and I am certain if I looked through access logs, I regularly visit it double-digit times daily.

Thankfully, for me, I have a robust RSS feed which feeds me hundreds of articles each day. It's not the same as Reddit, but it wasn't curated to be.

I'll be turning more to Mastodon to see what gets shared on my feed, and perhaps I'll just log off a bit more.

I am about to start tackling my collection management project, so that will take up a fair bit of time as well.

Edit: According to The Verge, over 6,000 subreddits have joined the protest.

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Simple Feed Filter

5/16/2023 11:19 am

Since FreshRSS doesn't really offer filtering by feed, I'm wondering if I should do a simple RSS pass through which takes in a RSS feed url and a string of filter terms and then spits out a corresponding RSS feed removing posts which get filtered.

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2/3/2023 8:26 am

I think I am adding "of the best" as an auto filtered phrase for my RSS feed reader. I'm tired of the "X of the best Y on Z" articles which pop up across various feeds I read. I get that they are good fodder for SEO and casual readers but I don't know the last time I decided to read one and I can't see myself doing that now.

Edit: As it turns out, FreshRSS does not currently have this functionality. I guess I have a coding project to explore.

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News sites & RSS

1/31/2023 6:55 am

As an avid RSS consumer, I have come to feel many of the frustrations and problems the internet faces with its best content delivery system. RSS can be a truly game changing thing if you adopt it. I have a single site I visit which pulls in content from over 100 others and lets me quickly skim through and read. The problem is, included in the many sites I pull in, in an effort to stay informed and well rounded in the news, I pull in feeds from:

And, while they accomplish my goal of providing me robust headline coverage, they also greatly clog my RSS feed with hundreds of posts a day. It's not the quantity which bothers me, but that there are a few repeated issues I have across these sites:

  1. SEO driven news posts - This morning I dug in, thinking I had an issue with my RSS reader not properly handling updated posts as I saw the same infographic and post about the Pope on my Al Jazeera feed. As I researched, what I realized is that I was seeing Al Jazeera's TWO posts which both relied on the majority same content and infographic. One was about the story, and one was an "explainer." There is no good way to smartly filter these out, so I will simply have to endure the noise.
  2. Straight spam - The Kent Reporter is a small blog, probably part of a bigger network behind the scenes, but they used to put straight up spam news for cars, products, medicines, etc. through their RSS feed though these didn't appear on the homepage. I get it. It's not a well earning gig and if someone supplements it with these posts, I don't have to like it, but I can't blame them. However, I was very annoyed they came out through the RSS feed.
  3. Lack of feeds - Honestly, the above news sources aren't all my primary sites. I'd love to fold some more news magazines and stuff into my reader, but they've dropped RSS support. And that frustrates me. Hopefully we'll see them return. Maybe.
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I want Firefox Reader

12/28/2022 12:51 pm

It isn't hard to find conversations bemoaning the shuttering of Google Reader. That single move dramatically shifted the landscape of the Internet. I use FreshRSS right now, and it honestly is fantastic at a lot of things. It's got some rough edges, but largely - I am quite happy with it.

So, then, why do I want Firefox Reader? I am imagining it as the vehicle which moves the needle for Firefox, returns RSS to a dominant tool for the Internet, and begins turning the tide of the landscape online again.

RSS is an open standard and is an incredible tool for conveying information across the Internet. Is it perfect? No. Is it great? Yes. The Internet is better for it being in prevalent use and will make the Internet better. And it makes it better for the exact reason many sites have begun removing it - it removes control from the website and puts it in the hands of the reader. They can consume the created content however, whenever, and wherever they want.

And that is what we need. That is the proper direction for the Internet.

That is why I want Mozilla and Firefox to do it. Mozilla, as a corporation, is positioned to financially benefit from pushing the Internet in the right direction and does not have overt motivations which interfere with this.

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Musing on RSS

12/27/2022 8:03 pm

It is hard to understate how much happier I am now that my RSS feed reader updates throughout the day automatically. Previously I had tried to get it working but couldn't, and so had to manually refresh which took a few minutes and left me with a mountain of articles to read and skim.

I hope more sites bring RSS back next year, it's a shame how many I am finding these days without accessible feeds.

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Behemoth

11/12/2022 9:01 am

A few weeks ago, I began thinking about a tool that integrated all my various online feeds. At the time I was thinking about integrating:

I've abandoned this idea for primarily two reasons.

  1. Writing my own RSS reader would be a big task. Thus the project's codename 'Behemoth.' Dave Winer's concept of RSS is great, but the realities of it is that there are a LOT of corner cases and things to take care of, etc. I read a blog entry about it a few months ago that cemented how much I was going to be facing and that really turned me off the idea.
  2. Twitter was going to absolutely dominate the feed. My Twitter account followed hundreds of people and it was really going to be a problem for this structure.

The first remains a massive project and undertaking. The second though has changed. I've been stepping back from Twitter. I'm not off it, but I am using it far less. And I think that the Fediverse would actually be a better usage here. The underlying nature and 'inefficiency' of it, the "content warnings" which are really subject lines, etc. This could really prove to be a better integration aspect.

Along with this idea, I am reminded of my custom Twitter client from back around 2007. I can't remember what I called it, but the defining feature I had come up with was that I hid any post a user made after their three most recent ones.

Back then we were pre-threads, and we were dealing with people going on massive tweet storms about topics. I got frustrated when they dominated my feed. So I decided to collapse any of these extra posts. You knew they were there, but it didn't fill your feed. I could see something similar here.

Ideally, another aspect of the Behemoth RSS portion would be combining RSS posts about similar topics. I subscribe to a number of feeds which overlap and so I can get a half-dozen entries on a news item. Having a system which groups based on topic and keywords would be a huge benefit.

So I guess saying I abandoned this idea isn't true. It continues to sit in the back of my mind as something I'm thinking about. But still, no immediate plans to work on it.

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Wired looks at the best RSS Feed Reader options out there

8/25/2022 9:23 am

I currently use a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS, which is pretty dang good. Because I use a cheap web host it isn't always lightning fast, but it does everything I want well enough. And it is included in the cost for hosting I'm already paying for. That said, I did give a few of these another look.

I've also considered building my own RSS feed reader. I codenamed it Behemoth because the project kept growing and growing in scope. I still might pursue it sometime, but it's a... monster.

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8/15/2022 6:50 pm

I want an RSS reader which lets me temporarily mute stories which contain words. For example, I've not seen eight different stories in my feed about the euthanizing of Freya the walrus. I'd like to be able to mute 'Freya' for the next week while those stories get printed.

Add it to the list of features on my eventual homebrew RSS reader.

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Screencast recording failed, will try again

7/30/2022 8:39 am

Tried something new this morning, I did a screen recording as I went through my RSS feeds and read the morning's news. Foolishly, I didn't check to make sure the recording setup was working since it was the first time doing it. After I finish, I open the video to discover it had recorded my mouse movements on a black screen and no audio. So... that didn't exactly work as expected. But, I might try it again another time. We'll see.

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A New RSS Reader For Me

6/22/2022 10:21 pm

I have, for over a year now, scanned and read tens of thousands of items from RSS feeds through my FreshRSS installation. As of this writing, I am subscribed to 114 different feeds which I break into eight different categories. Though, the truth is, I don't use the category organization nearly at all. And part of that is because, it isn't relevant to my consuming the feed, the categories are there for me to manage my feed.

I will check my reader several times throughout the day, usually seeing between 50 and 200 posts when I do. And I don't bother going site by site or anything. I just use hotkeys and quickly jump to each entry, scanning through them for interesting stuff. I'd wager 80% of the links I post here originate in my RSS feed now. I love it.

That said, I've had a germinating idea for a new RSS reader-esque site/tool sitting in my head for weeks now. I had a few different pieces and ideas, and today's blog post by Dave Winer stirred it back up for me.

Within an hour, I had a list of features & ideas jotted down. The original idea was something more akin to a Tweetdeck style multi-column layout social bookmarking site.

But Dave's post caused me to reframe the idea and repurpose the UI. I do think this idea is more than just an RSS feed reader. I think of it more as a personal information hub. I'd integrate other API services, such as social platforms (pulling tweets in?), sports, weather updates, etc. Maybe even email.

The screen layout is in columns, though I don't yet have sizing or design concepts really in mind. I think there are two main columns and the ability to add more.

The main (to me, that means left, but we'll see how it ends up) column of this is the "Fast Lane" (working title) - which would be the most recent unread feed of stuff sorted chronologically. It's the firehouse of information.

I think the next column becomes a "Queue" list. You can flag content in the fast lane, and it gets pulled to the right so you have more time to peruse it. But the stuff in that column has an expiration. I've toyed with this idea when I was using Glowbug's draft post functionality as a quasi "to read" list. I didn't want to get to overwhelmed with things, so I was instituting a 48 hour timeout for this column, after that time it got dropped, assuming that since the item was not worth the effort to read in that time, that it was no longer important. If I really wanted to read something, I'd either read it immediately, or save it more permanently to come back to. I think that same idea would go into effect on the Queue. Though you'd customize the timeout time.

As I said, you would also have the ability to make different lanes. Maybe you want to filter on keywords, or a lane just filled with specific data sources. Or if it does integrate email, then you have a dedicated email inbox. That should be doable.

Now, also as above, sometimes I will just want to save things for a longer term purpose. Maybe it's a future blog post or maybe it's another project. That's when things get parked. And Parking is the more full "let's archive it, tag it, categorize it, etc." Save snapshots of the page, etc.

That's the core of the idea.

All of that could be just for an RSS reader style implementation. But I think this idea could also be more of a central hub. As someone who hungrily consumes information and data, this structure would really appeal to me. And it would allow me to combine my RSS reader and my Wallabag/Pocket content. You could come across a page or article outside of it, and then immediately queue or park it. The focused reading would need to be aces, optimized for ease and comfort of reading across devices.

And who knows what else there would be. Lots of integration ideas to play with and this is already quickly becoming a behemoth project. But... I'm not intimidated. I'm excited. God help me.

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Mailbox-style Readers

6/22/2022 12:53 pm

Dave Weiner hits on a really good point about RSS readers and the popularity of the mailbox style UI. I have been so used to this UI design that I never considered an alternative, but he's 100% right.

Here's the idea I tweeted at him:

...

I don't have time for another coding project.

Damnit Dave.

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5/20/2022 6:54 am

I have had an idea for a new RSS reader. It's a tool I want, but I don't really want to build. Currently my RSS reader pulls in 97 different feeds from varying sources, mainstream news, regional news, blogs, link aggregators, etc. One of my frustrations is when I see multiple articles on the same topic sporadically through my feed. Granted, this isn't a huge issue, but each successive article is an increasing volume of noise in the feed.

It makes sense, because I am purposefully pulling in diverse feeds, multiple places are covering a topic. And if it is an important topic, then it is good for multiple perspectives, etc. This issue is one thing preventing me from actually pulling in more feeds, with this system, the posts on the same topic suddenly become a potential value add rather than a detractor.

But at the same time, I'd really like to smooth the feed and instead see a singular entry on the topic with a prominent inclusion of "these other posts are discussing it as well."

So, I've had this idea for a while. Last night I think I found an open source project which would get me much closer and be, at the least, a first tool in looking at posts and identifying ones which have overlap. I will have to explore it further this weekend.

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Glowbug + Wallabag

5/18/2022 7:49 pm

I just hacked in a new feature on the frontpage of this blog, I've integrated my Wallabag with this blog! Wallabag is a web application allowing you to save web pages for later reading, there is a popular tool called Pocket which does the same thing. The difference between Wallabag and Pocket is that Wallabag is something I can self-host.

The first level of this integration is that you can see what articles are currently sitting unread in my Wallabag. These are things that I come across through the day and I throw them in there to come back to at some point, maybe. I make no guarantees on the quality of them as they are often saved either based purely on the subject, or maybe by reading the first paragraph or so.

I have a few further ideas:

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5/17/2022 7:48 am

I make heavy use of an RSS reader called FreshRSS that I selfhost. I currently have it pulling in nearly 100 different RSS feeds from news, tech, science and general blogs. One feature I would love is the ability to quick filter.

Here's what I am thinking: I read an article about Pixar's new movie, Elemental. Great. I am now aware of this movie. However, it's the first day of the trailer and every outlet is rushing to cover it. I'd love to be able to add a filter that removes every post which includes "Pixar" + "Elemental" for the next 7 days.

Quick and simple, I just wouldn't see those posts. Sure, an occasional article I'd like to see might get caught by these filters, but the noise it would remove would far outweigh the possible false negative.

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Two Important Tools with the Waning Days of RSS

6/26/2021 11:32 pm

Kill the Newsletter - Create a one-use email inbox where every email it receives is turned into an RSS feed.

FetchRSS - A website which allows you to create an RSS for a blog-esque website including a very easy to use picker to identify the different elements on the page that can build the RSS feed.

With these tools, I can turn so much more of the information I consume online into an RSS feed to be imported into my RSS reader.

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6/12/2021 10:57 am

I have been using a FreshRSS install for a few months now, allowing myself to return to the realm of RSS feeds. And after those past few months I've dealt with a number of websites using truncated bodies of posts in the RSS feed, and occasionally clicking through to the full article on the website.

Well, last night I discovered a feature of FreshRSS that I had not known - and that is the ability to actually have it pull the full post body from the website through defining of the post body's CSS container. It's technically somewhat simple (I understand how to implement it, conceptually) but still having that function is amazing and has already made my RSS feed so much better.

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