Hacker News Reader

Comment by douglaswlance | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options.

(Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!)

http://feedly.com

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I use Newsblur and have been a happily paying customer since Google Reader went down.

When Google Reader died, I tried several alternatives including Feedly. At that time it could import your feeds, but it didn't do export. I don't now, but I didn't want to use a service that locked-in RSS feeds.

I think you can back up OPML to Dropbox, which should provide kind of export facility, since OPML is a generic format.

Feedly does OPML import/export now. It worked for me the other day.

I'm just a (non-paying) customer.

https://blog.feedly.com/opml/

Ah, didn't know that. Even better, thanks for the pointer!

I'm in exactly the same boat, and ended up on Go Read, but recently I was looking for a solution which had better mobile support and came back to Feedly.

Created an account first and checked whether you can export your OPML, and indeed you can in the feed settings: https://i.imgur.com/ttPNrd1.png

The mobile app is great too, it has become my main RSS reading platform.

Same. I used google reader heavily when it was around. Now I don't bother using any 3rd party service and I just host my own RSS server (tt-rss). Not going to start using a service and get used to it, only for it to shut down.

I didn't even use a service like Google Reader, but when it died, I got caught up in the flood of alternatives, and am now a very happy Feedly user.

Didn't even know what I was missing!

I use it daily for years and was shocked to find that it supports pinch zoom on iOS - but not android (where i use it).

Feels like it that's just tip of the iceberg re. things they could improve - for example they finally, finally!, added ability to create categories/tags for free (was paid feature).

I understand it's tough to run a business like this (and why google killed this, at least officially) - but i wouldn't actually mind an occasional ad.

I vaguely recall Apple getting the patent for pinch to zoom for a while, and not getting native support on Android after Apple lost it, and having to reimplement it for the longest time when doing things on Android.

My use of RSS has fallen (very recently) so I only consume a few feeds every day.

However, I both enjoy and dislike Feedly. Here’s the rundown:

Pros)

- advanced features like highlighting, team management

- pure free offering that just works

- integration with pretty much every feed reader app out there

Cons:

- no ability/willingness to pull full text

- iOS app is honestly kind of clunky

I emailed them that I’d willingly migrate from a different app that I pay a subscription for if only they’d pull the full text, but they told me that is an intentional non-feature. Big bummer.

Given that one of the blogs I follow charges for access to a full-text RSS feed, my guess is that some sites might be upset with them if they did that.

Or pretty excited depending on how they charge.

Ah yes, one of the resources I follow is a newspaper where I pay for the news weekly (FT). I only get the title and a link.

In regards to your full text request. The publisher has the option what to syndicate, truncated or full.

What you are asking them to do is have a crawler go to the site and pull the full text whenever they feel they are being served truncated.

Not only does that go against the nature of RSS, but would be costly for them.

What app do you pay for that does this? Is it even using RSS?

Quite a few apps provide this. One is called Newsify.

I don’t know that it goes against the nature of RSS. I kind of feel that providing only a title of the article and a link goes against the spirit. But nature and spirit are different.

Unfortunately newsify is ios only

Feedly is the only one I've found where I can sync my feed between browsers and my phone. Every other service seems to be stuck in one area or another. It's really quite annoying. I need a feed reader that works on every device that I read things on.

It really depends on how it's done. Some sites, like Wired, tend to give you a short, one or two sentence abstract of the article so you get the general gist. If it piques your interest you can click through for the real meat. I'm okay with this. They have a paywall after you read more than some amount per month, and I believe they have a special subscriber RSS feed with full text. So this solution seems like a good way to both respect my time (by only inducing me to click into stories I want to read) and maintain the value of their subscription.

Other sites, like Slate, are more annoying. They write headlines and opening paragraphs that are "Slate-pitches" that are trying to goad you into clicking. These I have no patience for and eventually unsubscribe from after my fourth or fifth click-through to a thoroughly boring article.

How well do these handle mathjax and the like?

I have been a happy user of Inoreader (no affiliation, just a happy user)

Shameless recommendation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16876636 (I built this)

Major, major thumbs up for Feedly. The first site I check every morning. >250 sites tied to it.

I can recommend Inoreader.

Seems everyone is recommending their preferred feed reader here so I'll mention the one I use as well.

Feedbro is a Firefox extension that lets me subscribe to and read feeds. Multiple layouts/formats.

I use it to subscribe to blogs, github repos etc.

I still miss a feature from the Googlr Desktop Search sidebar where it would autosubscribe/unsubscribe to rss feeds as you browsed around the web. I think it looked at what sites I visited, tried a few entries in the feed and continued/canceled based on if I read them or not.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bazqux. It's cheap, fast, and has all the features I want.

Agreed. But it has been very frustrating that they haven't allowed boards to be public.

Maybe someone knows a service that lets you mark posts from your feed to be shared as a public collection?

Newsblur kind-of has this. You can "Share to your Blurblog," but I don't see a way to have multiple Blurblogs.

You can also tag stories and each tag can have a RSS feed that others to subscribe to, but I don't think there is a web page to send people to for your taggged stories.

yeah feedly has been my alternative since google reader died. but the issue is that even if some sources still have feeds, many sources strip feed of all the content and only give you a list of titles and links. that quite sad to witness if one lived trough the rss golden age

Feedly is nice but centralized. We should have learned the lesson.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises.

I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop.

How so? I'm sure there are plenty of RSS readers on GitHub you could fork and then be safe from the developer abandoning it.

RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and it's trivial to switch between them. I don't really care which one I use, so developer abandonment isn't my concern. The only important things are the list of my feeds and which items I've read. If my laptop goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. If Feedly goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. The difference is that Feedly is more likely than my laptop to give me notice first.

So Feedly is actually better about centralization than using a local reader. As a bonus, everything is synced across all my devices and I can quickly read a few articles on my phone while waiting for my name to be called at the pizza place.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop.

Care to justify that statement?

Your laptop is not a distributed system. If it is lost or destroyed, you lose your feed reader.

Someone didn't learn.

What didn't I learn? The message couldn't have been to not rely on a centralized service for RSS feeds, because switching to a new service was trivial. I ended up better off than before Reader shut down. My lesson about RSS readers was that it's fine to trust a centralized service because there's basically no risk if it goes away.

I learned a bigger lesson about not trusting Google services in general, but I don't see how that means I shouldn't use Feedly.

I just signed up. I added one RSS feed (Reddit programming sub) and then tried to add another Google keyword.. it popped up trying to charge me..

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