NetNewsWire 5.0 – Open-Source RSS Reader for Mac
thesweetsetup.com
thesweetsetup.com
> (We’re also working on an iOS version.)
I am seriously looking forward to this. Syncing from iOS and Mac would make sense here.
And technically it does it really well. The FAQs in News Explorer support page try to explain some issues that can arise but I've never found them (my Mac Mini always running News Explorer at home and use it from my iPad, iPhone, and two laptops).
I read a fair amount of serials these days, and while most notify updates over RSS (though not necessarily with a full-text feed), neither generic RSS clients nor offline readers (e.g. pocket, instapaper, …) are really built for multi-updates works, the ability to browse across chapters, re-read a work, …
I guess an option would be to collect updates into ebooks, but there it's not quite clear how various epub readers handle updates (e.g. can I point the reader towards a URL and it'll check for updates on its own, do I have to update manually, do updates only work through proprietary storefronts?)
https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
I personally pay for and recommend a hosted RSS service called Bazqux, and they host the FiveFilters full-text RSS service for their customers.
The core issue is not partial feeds, it's — as the first paragraph describes — the ability to collect and collate feeds into persistent offline-available books (for lack of a better word).
Having full-text feeds don't really do anything when the feeds are still ephemeral, mixed together, to be sent to a separate reader for any sort of offline permanence, and basically unavailable for later (also offline) re-reading. The RSS feed of a serial is a way to get update notifications, it's not a feed of articles which become outdated once you've read them.
Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web service called Crofflr. (Notice Crofflr seems to be under no active dedelopment, but in my experience it just works). I guess Instapaper offers a similar service, but I never tried it. You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or other read-it-later service) part with tools such as If This Then That. Hope this helps.
Certainly.
> Personally, I "solved" a similar issue of mine (collecting posts I want to read in a weekly EPUB and send them on my Kindle) with Pocket and a web service called Crofflr.
Interesting. That is sort of the things I've considered, however each serial's feed really is a single work being updated (mostly append-only I guess, I don't know how many serials authors go back and significantly rework previous entries) and I don't know how well epubs and their clients deal with updates / additions (without intermediate proprietary storefronts).
I really need to knuckle down and play with epub, seeing how googling around doesn't seem to yield anything useful.
> You can automate the RSS-to-Pocket (or other read-it-later service) part with tools such as If This Then That.
"RSS to pocket" isn't really the issue, going through my RSS feed, reading the regular entries and sending the serials to pocket isn't much of a drain / difficulty. The issue is mostly that serial entries can accumulate rather fast in pocket (especially for those with small frequent entries e.g. one of the defunct serials I used to follow would publish a page per day), and so pocket is a mess of interspersed normal articles to read later and chapters from dozens of serials. Because of that I regularly find out I've skipped chapters.
[0]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-rss-reader/id11587...
Vienna is a free and open-source RSS/Atom newsreader for macOS https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss
Most of the readers can't fetch the whole article when rss has only an excerpt (or do ot poorly). This is a must for me.
A few years ago I had over 300 feeds in Google Reader, and even migrated them to Feedly and Reeder, but eventually I ditched them to my most important 10 and built something to get any new things only once a day (won’t link here so people don’t think I’m spamming).
But, both of these readers still make the assumption that I want to keep a feed reader open all day every day to check feeds and interrupt me when new ones come in. I'd like something that runs on a server and emails me a link to an rss "digest" once a week. I currently imagine that digest being a "newspaper" stream where the full content of every feed item is listed in chronological order. You can skip ahead to the next item with 'n' if you don't want to finish the item you're on.
I'm sure I'll get around to building it one day.
You can find the link in my website, if you’re curious.
Edit: major difference there: I don’t download the content, just link to it.
I can reach it via Chrome, and analyzing via multiple tools, all report things are fine, except for downfor.io ( https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/focusd.co ):
- https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime - http://currentlydown.com/focusd.co - http://downforme.org/is-focusd.co-down-today-for-everyone - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3bb6faf9400000 - https://www.ionos.com/website-checker-result - https://www.site24x7.com/check-website-availability.html
:/
@ScottFree please reach out to me, I'd love to pay you back somehow for making me discover this problem!
1) Support both Windows and macOS
2) Can import a Fever database
Moving from Fever is a pain which keeps me on my usual host, but it'd be great to migrate it somewhere else, preferable something self-hosted. I also think my license is tied to a specific domain to make matters even more annoying.
It has been a while since I used Fever, but I remembered it being able to export OPML files, which most feed client should be able to import.
Maybe I should write it. :-)
All feeds are now at the same level and basically unusable :-(
It's the same effort to moving to a completely different product/service (which it is in fact).
Haven't found anything on the roadmap but still exploring
It's better than nothing for sure
It also has no sorting and adopts the iOS style lack of information with a single text entry for each item instead of sortable columns. It is really best to treat it as a new program not a sequel much like what happened to Final Cut Pro.
You cannot keep using the paid version because it stopped working for some feeds.
Just added it to our corporate 11ty site using a plugin. So glad the open web is on the upswing.
So I got three independent interfaces: one to configure the feeds, one to read them and other to organize and search/recall. Each with different folder structure optimized for the task at hand.
You can self-host a backend such as Nextcloud News, TT-RSS, FreshRSS. Your client then needs to sync two-way with such a backend.
Using Newsboat (a TUI RSS reader) as standard, I'd say the following backends are applicable:
urls-source (parameters: <source>; default value: "local")
This configuration command sets the source where URLs shall be
retrieved from. By default, this is ~/.newsboat/urls.
Alternatively, you can set it to opml, which enables newsboat's
OPML online subscription mode, to ttrss which enables newsboat's
Tiny Tiny RSS support, to oldreader, which enables newsboat's The
Old Reader support, to newsblur, which enables NewsBlur support, or
feedhq for FeedHQ support, or ocnews for ownCloud News support, or
inoreader for Inoreader support. Query feed specifications will be
read from the local urls file regardless of this setting. (example:
urls-source "oldreader")
NetNewsWire looks good (Vienna looks like macOS did 15 years ago). However, it does not support nearly as many external synchronization as Newsboat does (only Feedbin, which is commercial, while I can self-host and prefer an open protocol).
As for an Android RSS reader, I haven't figured that out yet, but Nextcloud News support a lot of sync clients [1]
RSS has a lot of quirks, I wonder if an open-source solution will ever become truly mainstream in this space though.
I migrated from Inoreader and it turns out it works pretty fine. Would like to see this possibility with NNW.
But hosting or paying for a common complete RSS service and accessing that with a limited set of clients seems the only viable approach these days.
Although in the last few weeks, I've foregone centralized services and do it all via NNW in the evening -- saves me from constantly checking feeds, too.
Now if only all services could retain RSS, there's a new CMS being used by Norwegian press that don't support it - I'm actually considering cancelling one subscription because I will miss a lot of the content :/
The few sites I checked doesn't offer any feed at least
That's a bummer for me, I find the last version of NNW to hold its caches for forever, leading to several dozen gigs of images I have to delete every now and again.
Since I am using Emacs, elfeed (https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed) is my best choice for RSS reader.
NetNewsWire on Mac is pretty good looking and fast software. But it is useless without its counterpart on iPhone.
When it comes to RSS feeds, it is an either/or scenario. You either have RSS wherever and whenever you want (and it has to be synced up and up to date), or you don't.
I want more developers to create unapologetically desktop apps — unconstrained, customizable, with multiple and filterable views of content, able to integrate and share data with other apps.
(Yes, these are not mutually-cancelling goals. You can have a good enough iOS app and a more interesting Mac app. However, developer time is finite, features beget bugs, and only a small fraction of users collaborate with an open source project)