Why and how to use RSS for consuming knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Why and how to use RSS for consuming knowledge

bluprince13.com

56 pointsbluprince1323 comments

I wrote yet another "rss to email" tools, which is what I use for consuming feeds:

Getting feeds into email means I have the local content available for searching, and am not tied to desktop/mobile, or a particular machine.

(Rewritten in go, primarily because the standard r2e was the last daemon/program on my host that required python. So switching let me drop a whole bunch of dependencies.)

> I have the local content available for searching

That's a good point. Hadn't considered that. Definitely have had moments where I couldn't find an article later with Google.

I self host FreshRSS. The grand majority of sites support RSS as well so it works for most things although you may have to apply some filters to content depending on the sites and what the feeds contain. It is a quicker way to get new articles lists from the places you care about to give you a custom feed of the sort of "news" you care about.

I read almost everything (news, blogs, even HN) via a combination of Feedly, a custom Node-RED scraper that turns some sites into proper RSS (and translates things like Swedish into English) and Reeder. It’s still the best way to quickly sift through news every morning.

Been using and paying for newsblur for some years now. Absolutely love it

Anything particular about it that you like. What makes it worth paying for? Just curious.

Another NewsBlur user and fan here. Here are only a few of the reasons I like it: 1. Extracts full text of RSS articles. 2. Is also a Twitter client 3. Ability to read email newsletters 4. Open source and works well with other services 5. Sophisticated iOS app (believes there’s something for android too) 6. Comment on and share articles through its (quasi)network of BlurBlogs. See for example its founder’s blog: https://samuel.newsblur.com/ 7. Easily import, export, add RSS/Atom feeds, jsonfeed and OPML. 8. A helpful community: https://forum.newsblur.com/

And many more:

@benrapscallion has pretty much mentioned everything. It works and has been working fine for the past 7 years that I have been using it. You can self host but I felt $24 per year for something I use daily is worth it.

Its cross platform and has an excellent Android app that I use. Has some nifty AI. text filtering capabilities that help to sort articles. It does both river of news and email inbox style rss display. Fast support as well and fairly active development that you can track on their repo

After Google Reader shut down I tried a lot of different services and Newsblur felt to me the most closest and natural successor. Its interface is simple and has been largely unchanged, so helps with muscle memory.

Feedly is fantastic for rss

Yeah, it was b/w Feedly and Inoreader for me. Went for Inoreader kinda randomly. Because I only use it as a backend, it doesn't seem like I need too many features.

I've created Tip Of The Day [1], an open-source website that provides daily tips from several categories. RSS is the recommended way to consume the content, but people can also use the web version or JSON.

[1] https://tips.darekkay.com/

https://feedreader.com has been working out really well for me for long period of time. It is not as popular as others, and that's a good thing.

Wow this article has changed my life!

Ahaha I'm glad you found it useful.

For me RSS died with the death of Google Reader

But RSS is everywhere. I use it for so many blogs and sites, as do many others. And for sites that don't have RSS there are services to turn them into RSS feeds. You can turn newsletters into RSS feeds. You can have RSS in your email client. RSS is thriving.

Is there a reliable way to create RSS feeds for sites that don't have them? That would be really great...

Try web feeds?

E.g. https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/04/convert-almost-any-we...

People keep saying that and I never quite get it. What was so unique about Google Reader? When it should down I imported my subscriptions into another reader and used that ever since, without problems.

It wasn't in anyway special or unique. Though, it was a good app and it took competitors several months to years to reach a similar level. But Google Reader dominated the market back then, and them closing it was a kind of signal. It was around that time that other rss-related services went into decline, while competing solutions like social networks and reddit were on their hype-train to popularity.

So it's kinda natural that people saw the shutdown of Google Reader as a death-flag for Newsfeeds as a whole. And they are not so wrong on this. The decline continued since then and so far there is nothing in sight to reverse it and start a new hype.

You should try Feedly. It’s like that but without the baggage of being owned by a company that suffers from ADHD.

I didn’t even know about RSS at the time. Just used facebook for everything.

hell no, RSS just shifted sideways to a feedly interface. still going strong though.

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