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Ask HN: How do you RSS?

44 points| Grae | 5 years ago

There is building momentum around a return to blogging and RSS. Perhaps we're near a tipping point.

To give another push: How do _you_ RSS? What are your preferred tools? What are the highlights of your feed these days and why? What practices and workflows bring you value? What considerations should consumers and producers of RSS content be aware of?

71 comments

order

gpanders|5 years ago

I self host Miniflux [1] and am really happy with it, although recently I have moved toward using Fraidycat [2]. I really like the way that Fraidycat groups things by author, whereas traditional RSS readers just give you a feed. This enables me to follow high-volume publishers (such as Marginal Revolution) without the anxiety of seeing the Unread count in my reader creep ever higher.

The only downside of Fraidycat for now is that you can only use it as a browser extension, so it doesn't work on mobile.

[1]: https://miniflux.app/ [2]: https://fraidyc.at/

obarthelemy|5 years ago

Firefox/Android accept all desktop extensions.

tmarman|5 years ago

I have been using Feedly since Google Reader was shut down. Use it across iPhone, iPad and web. I also use it to capture other articles and bookmarks on my boards.

I have subscribed to Pro for awhile but mostly for search and a few other things. I think they do have feed limits on the free tier.

I’ve tried and used a lot of different readers over the last 20 years but for me the most important is sync of read status across my consumption devices.

I have a lot of feeds across many different categories. HN, lobsters, dotnetkicks and a bunch of other high volume aggregators make up one category. Then I have feeds for startup/VC blogs, engineering blogs, some hyper local stuff, and some other non tech categories I’m involved in (food, wine, etc)

Shorn|5 years ago

When Google reader shut down I switched to, and now pay for, https://inoreader.com for reading (they have a free ad-supported tier or paid tiers). The HTML and iOS browsing experience is excellent.

For dealing with sites that don't support RSS, I run a paid service https://kopi.cloud - it allows you to give out anonymous mail addresses to services such as Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, etc. that can be configured to publish all mail received as an RSS feed.

benrapscallion|5 years ago

How’s your website kopi.cloud different from kill-the-newsletter.com?

geoffhill|5 years ago

I use NewsBlur in Firefox and via the Android app, and I'm very happy with it.

tomjen3|5 years ago

I came to this post through newsblur, which does a decent job on sites that doesn't give a full feed.

Though I would want to try out a local reader that works offline, just because that would be nice.

obarthelemy|5 years ago

I do most of my browsing from RSS. I've got a handful of sites in my browser's bookmarks, and about 40 in my RSS feed. I've got Feedly Pro, and use both the Windows Web client and a few different apps on Android (I'm trying to wean myself of gReader Pro, but the thing still works after 5+ yrs w/o updates, and is just perfect). I dismiss 90% of RSS items because dupes or not interested (there's a reason those sites didn't make my bookmarks). I might dismiss a bit less is there was a snooze option, but there isn't. I'll do most of my reading in-app, and switch to the browser only if I want to read or add to the comments. My main issue currently is sites getting borked by google's "html simplifier" (whatever they call it). The thing I love most aside caching + offline reading is Firefox Andoird ability to open pages in the background, so I can sift thourgh my RSS items, dismiss 90%, and open a few pages that I'll get to once I'm done cleaning up my RSS feed and have time.

anotherevan|5 years ago

Most importantly: http://hnapp.com/ to produce an RSS feed for Hacker News. I use a feed that returns anything reaching a score of 50 or gets 40 or more comments.

http://hnapp.com/rss?q=score%3E49%20%7C%20comments%3E39

Have used Newsblur since Google Reader closed and been very happy with it on desktop and Android.

https://www.newsblur.com/

I use Pocket to save articles I want to read later, which makes them available on my Kobo ereader. (I'd switch to Instapaper if my ereader supported it, it seems to handle sites Pocket often chokes on.)

Grae|5 years ago

Personal pain point: Math seems to be a growing topic on the web and tools like MathJax are a popular tool for talking about Math. But (most? all?) RSS readers won't render MathJax. Does anyone have a simple and effective way to handle display issues like that?

vehemenz|5 years ago

You could CDATA a MathJax-produced SVG, but I don't know how well that would be supported in RSS readers. I doubt accessibility extensions would work correctly either.

chuckgreenman|5 years ago

Isn't there a way to default back to a rendered image if MathJax isn't supported?

rbinv|5 years ago

That won't work unless you embed scripts into the RSS and run those (which kind of defeats the point of "really simple syndication" and would lead to JS-heavy monstrosities).

hombre_fatal|5 years ago

I recently got back into RSS and have been using (free) NetNewsWire on macOS/AppStore (https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire).

Though RSS clients in 2020 really need to be scraping the origin website. 50% of my feeds are just one-liner blurbs.

RSS clients that just do RSS feel anachronistic. I've been browsing some other solutions, but the modern client really should be a hub that can turn any website into a feed.

Someone linked Fraidycat which is on the right path, objective-wise.

ctas|5 years ago

I'm using my self-built reader called Feedist (not public) . It's extremely lightweight and built in boring PHP. The most important feature to me is the personal recommendation page which shows me the top 50 new posts in my subscribed feeds based on my previous reading behavior. It uses almost the same scoring algorithm as HN behind the scenes. It's so accurate and saves me a ton of time. Subscribing to a lot of feeds creates a lot of noise and this makes it easier to find content I might enjoy.

vroomik|5 years ago

Moved to inoreader - free tier for up to 150 feeds, works on mobile too

nickthegreek|5 years ago

Another vote for inoreader. I glady pay inoreader at a higher level than features that I need in order to help ensure I never go thru a google reader debacle again. Inoreader also integrates in facebook pages, twitter accounts and youtube subscriptions to your RSS list.

fxj|5 years ago

I got a pro subscription and I read all my news feeds and twitter through it. I am willing to pay 50 euros per year for such a great service. I also like the android and ios apps which do a great jobs reading news on mobile devices.

neonate|5 years ago

I specifically installed Waterfox so I could keep using SageRSS. It's ancient, but I've never found anything else that comes close to being as good. People have made modern copies, but they got subtle things like font sizes and preview windows wrong so I found that they all fell in an uncanny valley for me.

miteyironpaw|5 years ago

I run an instance of Selfoss. I found this thread because selfoss polls hackernews via https://hnrss.org/frontpage?count=1

nacs|5 years ago

Same here. I tried tiny-rss and a few others and settled on (self-hosted) Selfoss.

Super easy to set up (PHP + mysql), supports tagging, inline-images, etc. I'm also subscribed to HN through the hnrss site (weird that HN doesn't have its own RSS feed).

Here's a screenshot of my feed:

https://thumbsnap.com/f/4AcGkWqu

s9w|5 years ago

Inoreader has always been great, better than google reader that everyone is mourning. I've been using it for 7 years now. Today I use it mostly for Github commit feeds actually.

sebastian65|5 years ago

Recently I've created https://rosselo.com, which provides useful and elegant news dashboard. Works in browser on every device.

It's under development now - freemium model will be presented soon (among other things). So don't hesitate to try it out, the current "trial" is in fact unlimited now so the whole service is currently entirely for free.

Any feedback will be appreciated!

rcarmo|5 years ago

Reeder on iOS and Feedly as a back-end. I don’t read news any other way, although I maintained this for a while:

https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap

Edit: I use Reeder because I can pull in articles in “Reader view” from obnoxious title-only feeds with a single tap. Don’t do those, post full articles or I most likely will keep looking for alternatives to your content...

agazso|5 years ago

After I stopped using FB I missed a mobile news reader app that works without having to install a server or create an account.

So with some friends we created an app called Feeds https://github.com/felfele/feeds

It does everything on the phone and there is no ads or tracking whatsoever. You can also mute content with keywords.

It is open-source and currently in open beta for iOS and Android.

fpadilha|5 years ago

If you are looking for something more robust, I would recommend Fluxonaut (https://fluxonaut.com). It's only for Windows and is still in beta but you can mix RSS, Twitter and YouTube quite nicely through multiple screens!

(Full disclaimer: I'm a founder, but I truly feel it's the best way to consume RSS if you use 2+ monitors on Windows =) ).

dave333|5 years ago

Pity the beta is closed already

rwbhn|5 years ago

Reading this via Feedly on Android. For audio podcasts when I'm biking I use BeyondPod Pro [1] - tried a bunch of options, it was the only one I found which reliably downloads episodes while on wifi and plays them with no issue while offline.

[1] http://www.beyondpod.mobi/android/index.htm

mantas|5 years ago

Vienna RSS client for Mac does all what I need. Feeds with simple organising. Flagging interesting articles. Good enough search.

As for producers - depending how noisy your feed is, please keep it long enough to fetch several days' content. It sucks if I don't open up the client and something goes missing pushed out by newer content.

ragebol|5 years ago

I use netvibes.com and have been for I don't know how long.

My dashboard there has some 8-ish tabs for different topics I follow, each with ca. 6 feeds.

I can mark each feed as read or a whole tab at once. Each tab has a counter of how much new stuff it has, so I can get a tiny sliver of excitement when there is some news about topic x.

chenxiaolong|5 years ago

I use the Feedly web UI on desktop and NetNewsWire (which is open source) on iOS. I'm not a huge fan of the Feedly web UI because it doesn't support scraping the source page for the full article text. Too many of my RSS feeds only include the first paragraph or even just the subtitle.

bastard_op|5 years ago

Hardest part these days is finding the rss feed. It used to be $url/rss, and gold. Then people moved on to fakebook and twitting, and it was forgotten.

I use theoldreader.com for news since google reader died, so long as I find decent content and an actually rss feed, I tend to add here.

disposekinetics|5 years ago

I'm fond of FreshRSS. It almost fills the void left by Google Reader.

biermic|5 years ago

Newsboat (a currently maintained fork of Newsbeuter). It's a wonderful easy to use commandline RSS reader.

https://newsboat.org

onyva|5 years ago

I use fieryfeeds on iOS. It integrates with Nextcloud news and Pocket and is quite featurefull. I moved most of my reading off twitter which I used to access with Tweetbot.

daledavies|5 years ago

I hosted Tiny Tiny RSS myself for years after Google Reader closed, I must say it was very stable and hardly ever needed intervention.

But eventually I got fed up and moved to Feedly.

dave333|5 years ago

Google reader -> Digg reader -> Inoreader free version. BBC and NYT news feeds, Business Insider and Hacker News for biz and tech respectively.

vandyswa|5 years ago

I host my own tt-rss, and the install FeedMonkey (via my own sources.vsta.org) which provides a very nice viewer.

TwoNineA|5 years ago

Self host FreshRSS and use Reeder on iOS.

devinegan|5 years ago

Tiny Tiny RSS self hosted. tiny Reader for iOS. There is an open source Android app as well.

winrid|5 years ago

I use "Reader" on Android.

Make your content either plain text or HTML that doesn't require JS.

eiro|5 years ago

i really like https://newsboat.org/. very few keystrokes to remember, super fast, ~/.newsboat/urls is a simple file with 1 feed a line.

newtronic|5 years ago

I use Feedbin in a browser on a computer, and in an app on phone and iPad.

sys_64738|5 years ago

My solution for sites that don't offer RSS is to ignore those sites.

hprotagonist|5 years ago

i switched to feedly when google reader died, and carried on as normal.

markandrewj|5 years ago

Anyone have recommendations for an Android RSS reader?

drdeadringer|5 years ago

Podcast Addict. Free with ads, chump change to make the ads go away.

It has discovery, search, and the ability to add RSS by url address too.

I use it for podcasts, webcomics, and even a comedian's "upcoming gigs" feed.

staffordrj|5 years ago

I just started using Flym and I love it. You can also install it from F-Droid.

captn3m0|5 years ago

Reeder on iPhone + MiniFlux, like many people here.

moltar|5 years ago

I use Feedly with Reeder app.

timbit42|5 years ago

QuiteRSS on Linux

rp00|5 years ago

Paid inoreader