Hacker News Reader

Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

For that matter, I think RSS is still needed for blog aggregation and reading... Since google killed reader and iGoogle, I find myself only reading a handful of sites regularly.

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I agree! RSS is kind of a magical thing, that's only really happened a few times - the widespread implementation of a standard that provides a better user experience at the cost of somewhat less control for content owners.

My headline is in response to certain voices in the industry which seem to be rooting for the end of RSS in favor of proprietary APIs - essentially, the YouTube-ization of podcasts. There's lots to unpack there, and to a certain extent it seems likely that more things will move away from open standards, but I'd prefer to hold the line to the best of our ability.

> Since google killed reader

Since then we actually have several better feed readers. There are several very great readers, from self hosted to free to paid.

I stuck with newsblur.com (paid)

If you haven't yet, give Newsblur a try. A very powerful and efficient interface, also integrates well with Newsrob, a free-as-in-freedom Android reader.

I also use NewsBlur. Is Newsrob better than NewsBlur's own Android app?

I haven't tried the Newsblur app for a while, but it used to be a long time ago.

My main usage is to download everything automatically while on wi-fi, with a readability version of the full pages, and read offline while commuting.

For some reason, the native Newsblur for Android was not the best for this, but Newsrob fit the bill quite nicely while being simple to use.

Maybe Newsblur app has caught up, but I haven't noticed.

Seconded – Newsblur's training feature actually pulled it ahead of Google Reader for me since it allowed me to improve the interest/disinterest ratio for certain feeds.

Could you link me to the current home of the newsrob project you are using? All I find seems to be unmaintained.

You're right - Newsrob is the old name. Now it is called GrazeRSS https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grazerss&h...

It is strictly in Maintenance mode, but still works and do its job well.

Thanks! I'm currently implementing api access for my feedreader (https://github.com/onli/feedtragon) and having another client available would be very useful. Though I'm not sure yet whether it can access a custom url with the greader api (many clients sadly can't, they are hardwired to specific services).

GrazeRSS is somewhat hard wired, but it has support for at least a few feed managers (Newsblur is not the only one). Maybe it is possible to just change the URL.

This could be something to try, if you're after something that's a bit more modern looking: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fred.feede...

Is newsblur close or similar to theoldreader.com? TOR is somewhat faithful clone of google reader but it's very heavy on the JS. Hardly usable on Firefox.\\

I see, it's very usable thanks to the online demo. Might switch to it.

You can also try bazqux.com. I'm the happy owner of a lifetime account there.

This is it! Very lean and has sensible functionality, defaults.

Hmm, the only thing I can find realted to Newsrob is that the development stalled when Google Reader disappeared and this three year old repository: https://github.com/marianokamp/newsrob

Is there something I'm missing? Flym News Reader looks quite good... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fred.feede...

The name changed to GrazeRSS a long time ago, but my memory keeps bringing Newsrob back.

I'm a fan fan of Inoreader. Does most of what Newsblur does, plus some extras, and looks nicer too.

I'm still sore about Google killing reader. I used to have a wide spectrum of stuff I used read via RSS (circa 50-60 blogs) and like yourself only read a handful of them now. I know there's Newsblur, but Reader just worked so well for me.

I pay a pittance to use Newsblur, and it's awesome.

Yeah, I've tried and paid for a couple of the google reader alternatives... the nail in the coffin for me was iGoogle going away. The pair of them together was just such a great thing, since it was my homepage, the aggregates tracked in reader with other sources was so great. I miss them as a set.

I am using https://bazqux.com (paid). It is crazy fast (it is written in Haskell), has a very bare interface and it supports Fever for mobile app integration.

Edit: There's also support for youtube channels: http://blog.bazqux.com/2015/06/subscribing-to-youtube-feeds....

Agreed. RSS is an amazing technology, but I miss a real good feedreader. I loved FeedDemon, but since its development stopped it got so sluggish when handling my RSS feeds.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird. It doesn't synchronise between devices (as far as I know), but for work-related feeds I use my work computer 99% of the time anyway.

I second Thunderbird. It's lightning fast for browsing through large numbers of feed items.

I've been using netvibes for 9 years without issue...

I use Inoreader, I quite like it:

https://www.inoreader.com/

Emacs has several, and since I tend to live in Emacs I never really noticed the whole Reader saga.

I would definitely be sad if I couldn't get my RSS feeds next to my NNTP and my IMAP in gnus.

There is also elfeed for Emacs: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed As good as butter-on-toast. It has a big list of news items with good support for (multi-)tagging and can use curl to fetch quite fast (2.0 feature, set `url-queue-parallel-processes' as high as you can, I've it set to 20).

There's also newsticker.el but I never could get it to work.

Great stuff, elfeed. Gnus is more my thing (I've been using it for a long long time) but I really like elfeed.

tt-rss is very good software, but never make the mistake of going anywhere near the community.

I tried tt-rss but it was running pretty slow for me, and I wasn't ever sure if I just configured something wrong or if it wasn't designed to archive tens of thousands of old articles. I switched to FreshRSS [1] and it's been running much faster for me and also has the option of running on SQLite. The interface isn't as nice as tt-rss but it works better on smartphones.

[1] https://freshrss.org/

> but never make the mistake of going anywhere near the community.

You made the right decision there. I'll use the software, but I won't recommend it for that reason right there.

digg reader is great

When Google Reader died, I ended up deploying my own RSS aggrigation service. I haven't looked back since.

Since everyone is chiming in with their preferred reader, I really like InoReader, and have been using that for the last few years. Works quite well.

I moved all my Reader feeds to Feedly. I have no idea how it compares to anything else; it works and does everything I need it to, so I'm content.

Yup, me as well. Feedly combined with Reeder on the phone is the perfect RSS-feed solution for me.

Feedly is amazing. Highly recommend.

I was worried about Reader's shutdown but my habits have not had to change at all. Been using Feedbin with Reeder on my phone for the past few years and it's been nothing but excellent!

I was using NewsBlur and it's damn good software. I felt like I was burning through 10s of articles a day rather than one or two good ones.

theoldreader is my replacement of choice.

That was one of the many I tried.. but it was really reader + igoogle that did it for me. I use the iChrome extension to get a lot of that, but it's not the same without the reader module, and the reader apps themselves aren't what I want for my start page... :-(

RSS is terrible for reading. If you're lucky the file actually contains some of the text. But multimedia, the full article, or formatting? Forget it. In the general case it functions as a link aggregator and little more, but it's fantastic at that. The reader doesn't matter at all if there isn't anything to read.

Is there an RSS reader that fetches the link and displays the article Instapaper-style?

What are the copyright issues around this?

Newsblur has a text mode which does that and can be enabled per-site or when you're viewing a story. On the website, you also have the option of the classic load-in-an-iframe mode which is good if you want the full site UI but don't want to have to manually poll for new stories.

Reeder (iOS) does that and it's great. When you open an item, it shows the feed content, with a prominent button that will snag the page content and run it through a mobilizer service. I think there's an option to make that the default functionality too, though I prefer to attempt reading the RSS data first for speed.

It works standalone or can sync with Feedly, Newsblur, or other services.

I think it's good netiquette to respect the site's RSS content choices. I've been using RSS for a long time now and it's no problem to click through to the actual article.

Thunderbird seems to do that for me.

You can blame that on publishers for not including the full content of their articles in their RSS feeds. When they do, it works perfectly. Most RSS feeds these days just have a sentence and the URL, if you're lucky.

I assume that's because they want page views, to sell adverts.

Plenty of feeds I subscribe to have the full article in the feed, but they're either non-profit organizations or personal blogs. Just one example: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/rss.xml

Isn't that how it's supposed to be? A short description in the <description> tag of the feed, with the full content not being downloaded until the user wants to go there?

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