#Business #Proposals
Why RSS matters · “The future of the web depends on simple, open standards.” https://ilo.im/1690yv
_____
#OpenWeb #SocialWeb #Content #WebFeeds #FeedReaders #RSS #Development #WebDev #Frontend #Backend
#FeedReaders
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/ordering-copper-moon-white-christmas-coffee-11-08-25/
Back in May I published a NLJ article titled Failing to Try Airport Illy Coffee Vending Machine. While researching the Illy vending machines, I came across a website called Vending Connection. Being a fan of vending machines, I added Vending Connection to my feed collection. Just yesterday (November 7), I read a new Vending Connection post titled Copper Moon Coffee Announces Two New Seasonal Blends: White Christmas and Winter Solstice. I usually buy my coffee beans at D’Amico in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood. D’Amico has a very good White Christmas blend. I was curious how the Copper Moon White Christmas compares. After concluding that the price is very reasonable ($31 for two pounds of whole beans with shipping), I placed an order. Christmas is coming early.
(Does this make up for my failure to try the Illy vending machine coffee?)
A deep dive into the #rss feed reader landscape
RSS feeds and, in one form or another, feed readers, have existed for more than 20 years. Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content from various sources in one place. And especially in recent years, also helping users deal with content overload.
> interesting overview, and the authors new RSS entry ( #Lighthouse now in beta ) looks interesting
#feedreaders
ஸ்கௌர்
இது ஒரு நல்ல இணைய தளம் – https://scour.ing
RSS பீட்களை கண்டுபிடிக்கவும் தொடரவும் நல்ல வாய்ப்பு அமைத்துக் கொடுக்கிறது. பார்க்க சாதாரணமாக இருந்தாலும் பிரமாதமான உள்வேலைகள் செய்திருக்கிறார் இதை உருவாக்குபவர்.
முதலில் ஒன்றிரண்டு என்றுதான் ஆரம்பித்தேன், அவர் அளிக்கும் பரிந்துரைகள் நாம் தொடர விரும்பும் விஷயங்களை வளர்த்துக் கொண்டே போகின்றன.
நாம் தொடரும் பீட்களை வேறு rss ரீடரில் வாசிக்கும் வாய்ப்பு உண்டு. அது போக நாம் பரிந்துரைக்கும் பக்கங்களை மட்டும் ஒரு பீடாக எடுக்க முடிந்தால் இன்னும் நன்றாக இருக்கும்.
மிக நல்ல முயற்சி. ஆதரவு அளிக்கும்படி கேட்டுக் கொள்கிறேன்.
A deep dive into the RSS feed reader landscape
https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/feed-reader-deep-dive
#HackerNews #RSS #FeedReaders #Tech #DigitalMedia #NewsAggregation #DeepDive
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/webber-miniflux-webapp-ubuntut-10-02-25/
I noted in my most recent New Leaf Journal article that I am temporarily daily driving Ubuntu Touch on my phone. One problem on Ubuntu Touch is its limited native app selection. But that may not be a problem for my feed reader. I run my own Miniflux instance and I always use it in a web browser. I used a native Ubuntu Touch web app called Webber to create a Miniflux “web app” (using Ubuntu Touch’s default Morph web broswer) and then successfully signed in (using a bluetooth keyboard to type my six word password). It works perfectly with the small caveat that my Miniflux instance has looked better than it does in Morph.
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/hacker-news-ai-volume-08-17-25/
In what appears to be his first post on a new blog, Zach Perkel tackles when, precisely, AI took over Hacker News. I subscribe to an feed of Hacker News page one articles. The sheer volume of AI-related submissions is bleak, almost as bleak as whatever happened to page one subsequent to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. There may now be more AI posts than references to Kagi (if you know, you know). I have applied Miniflux filters to block much of what I consider to be the noise. That has significantly reduced the number of items in the feed. At some point I may think about using Hacker News RSS to create a more curated feed, more likely to yield articles of interest to me. Did I just give myself a new article topic?
Following the advice and instructions at https://jamesg.blog/2024/06/06/publish-h-feed, I've now enabled #hfeed (HTML feed) for my blog¹ and my linkblog². I really like that idea of HTML of a page itself being a machine readable feed for #feedReaders. Unfortunately, AFAIK, no readers have native support for HFeed yet. Thankfully, we can use https://granary.io/ to convert an HFeed to an #Atom or #RSS #feed.
¹ https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/
² https://abhinavsarkar.net/linkblog/
Uso feeder como lector RSS en Android, pero me gustaría usar un lector que permitiera bloquear artículos no solo por su título, sino también por su contenido (por ejemplo, bloquear todos los artículos con "ESCAPARATE" en el cuerpo).
¿Conocéis alguno con esa opción?
#rss
#newsfeeds
#feedreaders
The Small God of the Internet
It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.
He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.
Guide for Constructing the Letter S from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta or The Model Book of Calligraphy (15611596) by Georg Bocskay and Joris Hoefnagel. Original from The Getty. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.
ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**
Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.
Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.
His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.
These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.
A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.
Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.
Heavily edited sloptraption.
- He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
- The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
- Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
- Old Google Reader People ↩︎
- On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
↩︎ - He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎
#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/blocking-banksy-in-miniflux-07-27-25/
I use a feed reader as my portal to online writing and media. Occasionally, sites that I otherwise enjoy become fixated with something I do not care about. I wrote about having this issue last year at the height of the Palworld fad. Yesterday, an article popped up on my feed list which reminded me of another annoying topic which is covered too often.
I do not care about Banksy. Nothing will ever make me care about Banksy short of him tagging my neighborhood. Banksy and the outlets can pursue social media shares (or whatever compels all the Banksy coverage) without me now that I added a global filter rule to Miniflux to ensure save me a few mark as read swipes or clicks.
Of course, I subscribe to myself in Miniflux, so I decided censor the title as to not block my own wonderful writing from my newsfeed.
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:MsDropbear42@infosec.space
2025-04-20@MsDropbear42 Update; happy one, i think.
Have been using Feedbro for years [with many excursions of various duration to test other #RSS AddOns], but recently my wunderlust returned [F has been doing some randomly irritating weirdarsenesses occasionally, like for many minutes after launching :firefox_nightly: Nightly, simply ignoring my clicks on its toolbar icon's dropdown list of new feeds, & its native links even to open its UI... plus, there's still my long-term discomfort with aspects of its UI's ergonomics & aesthetics... and ofc that shitty name].
a few nights ago i installed one i'd not seen before, RSS Sage-Like by arielg. It has a minimal UI [which opens in the FF sidebar] that is ok albeit lacks some important config options though having some others that are nice. It is like Brief & Livemarks in that it relies on the actual parent websites to stream the feeds... which i am now fine with despite my original aversion to this style. Its two big weaknesses though, which have driven me from it now, are that its icon does not indicate new feeds, so one must constantly manually check... & that it #necrofetches like a bastard, sigh.
two nights ago i installed Brief again [i've had many dalliances with it over recent year/s], even though it's not been updated for 9 months, so logically should still have the same flaws i noted last time/s. However i wanted to assess if i might be able to tolerate them any better, this time. Thank goodness i did, coz i discovered a setting [per-feed, unfortunately, not global] i'd either not seen before or else not understood... "Don't mark changed items back as unread". This is fantastic, as now having tediously gone thru every feed's Properties ["Feed Settings" in the context menu] & ticked it, the #necrofetching problem seems to be quashed! IF this misbehaviour is now defeated, the only remaining issue will be... can i tolerate its "major compatibility problem with Guardian Australia mp3 podcasts"?
Ah, the eternal #struggle of the #sysadmin trying to outsmart feed readers and crawlers—like trying to teach a cat algebra. 🐱➕📚 Yes, please, enlighten us with your groundbreaking discovery: polling every 10 seconds is excessive. 🤯 If only you could configure *real life* with a cron job! ⏰💥
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/ #feedreaders #techhumor #cronjob #catlogic #HackerNews #ngated
A sysadmin's rant about feed readers and crawlers (2022) — http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/
#HackerNews #sysadmin #rant #feedreaders #crawlers #technology #2022
@Stephenleader @charliejane @pluralistic What #feedreaders work for you?
I have spent the last day or so fidding with a new RSS reader set-up after deciding to move off using a phone-exclusive option (the very nice Handy Reading). I decided to return to Miniflux, hosted with Pikapods. I imported my feeds and had more than 3,000 “unread” articles on first import. I tried to mark several feeds “as read” to start getting organized. However, it was not working. Was there something wrong with my set-up? Or, as I learned indirectly from someone who raised a GitHub issue wanting an option to Disable mark as read confirmation, perhaps the issue was that I needed to allow scripts on my Miniflux instance in uBlock Origin (which is set to not allow 1st or 3rd party scripts by default).
(PS: I would not want to disable the mark all as read confirmation.)
I have been using #Miniflux as my feed reader for a couple of years now. It is intentionally minimalistic, and hence it lacks certain features. One thing that I sorely miss is the capability to sort the feed entries by various criteria like entry reading time etc. Thankfully, Miniflux lets users customize the UI by injecting custom #JavaScript code via settings. So I took this in my own hands (see the attached image).
I wrote a note explaining the options, along with the code: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2025/customizing-miniflux
Amazon is selling the Google Pixel Tabel for $280. It supports GrapheneOS and I have been tempted to buy one because my preferred feed reading set-up uses Handy Reading (a free and open source Android feed reader) and the Pixel tablet would be a reading upgrade over my Google Pixel 3a XL (running DivestOS, my main “phone” is a Pixel 6a running GrapheneOS). But $280 is still steep. I just can’t quite get there. We’re sticking with the 3a XL for reading, although I need to work on a more ergonomic reading set-up to avoid right hand cramps.
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/pixel-tablet-temptation/
I read a new AlternativeTo blog post about the re-design of the Reeder app. Reeder, I read, is a feed reader for iOS and MacOS. I am not personally familiar with it because I do not use Apple hardware and even if I did, I would not opt for a proprietary feed reader. The design of the app looks interesting, however. As far as I can gather, Reeder was originally a traditional feed reader (that experience is apparently still available), but the re-design turns it into a feed reader with a more social media stream aesthetic. I would not opt for that design for reasons similar to those I offered for not wanting to use feed readers to follow social streams, but I nevertheless think the idea may be good for feed usage in general. Using feeds is good (regardless of the app), and offering people an interface they are more familiar with than that of a traditional feed reader may help increase uptake.
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/thoughts-on-reeder-app-re-design/
The Privacy Dad blog published a good list of open source feed readers for Android. My current set-up is a Miniflux running as a PWA (I am running a Miniflux instance with Pikapods). But before I switched to Miniflux, I was using an open source local feed reader for Android that is not on The Privacy Dad list: Handy Reading. Handy Reading is a fork of the now-unmaintained Flym RSS and is a very nice feed reader. It can extract full text and allows the user to set how often each feed is checked. What sets it apart from similar solutions, however, is that you can save articles from outside your feeds into Handy Reading, making it a quasi read-it-later solution as well. To be sure, it is not as good a read-it-later tool as something like Omnivore, Wallabag or Shiori, but it is a nice addition to an all-around solid local open source feed reader.
https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/foss-android-local-feed-readers/
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst