The Old Reader
theoldreader.com
theoldreader.com
Thinking about it now, I think it's absolute best feature is that it is stable. There's not this constant flow of bullshit "new feature! redesign! experience the new and enhanced look and totally fucked up interface of our new version!" that you get from most other bullshit companies. I love that. It's a great tool, because it's reliable.
Only enhancement I can think of would be some ad-filtering, as a few of my feeds have metastasized "Sponsored" content that must be filtered out before polluting my brain.
I used a google address for my Account but don’t sign in via google. Feedly noticed my account was a google account and kept trying to redirect me to googles login. Support wasn’t helpful, and only responded when I posted a workaround on Reddit/twitter.
Anyway at that point I started looking for alternatives. And ultimately landed on the older reader and miniflux. Frankly I am still on miniflux.
Feedwrangler had a very primitive version of this but anyway it's end-of-lifed.*
NetNewsWire used to have excellent filtering but it's been rewritten without them. I use ReadKit on the mac because it does have pretty good filtering. Its own rewrite doesn't have that feature yet, and sharing the filters between platforms will be a future feature. But at the moment, as far as I can tell, it's my only option.
* The developer gave everyone a year's notice and arranged a transfer mechanism to another feed service. Pretty responsible!
Since the messages are "just email" you can filter, tag, and process them with .forward/.procmailrc, or your google filters.
I put together a CLI of my own to do the fetching, but there are a whole bunch of them out there and to be honest you probably don't need much complexity - beyond a couple of simple filters, and include/exclude regular expressions.
So you could take an RSS feed from a site, and filter it to just articles with a certain tag.
I've been moving my reading consumables to email for the past 2 years for indexing, categorizing and its been very stable. I'm going to try this out.
Thanks!
I did realize a year ago I should still have things in email and forward them from there. So for newsletters and general marketing emails, I have them come to two of my emails before forwarding them to https://stoopinbox.com. I see feed readers are beginning to accept better newsletter and email features.
I also like YouTube to be in a central feed reader too. Mostly to stop myself from spending more time on it than I’d like to. And YouTube’s playlist organization is a pain for me. There’s no way to search between your own playlists on mobile. So my obsessive organizing ends up having lots of duplicate playlists.
I also mostly care about filtering as well. Patterns and categorizing things is a love for me. I need to spend a bit of spare time on figuring it all out. Especially before Inoreader renewal comes up.
I haven’t yet figured out which mobile or desktop app to use for feed reading though. Do I use Inoreader directly or something that syncs with it. Not sure if the filtering works if syncing.
Regardless, do you have any opinion on any mobile feed readers? Are you using the old Readkit on desktop still?
It works really well, the interface is simple and unadorned, with an emphasis on the targeted content rather than a flashy frontend.
I don’t think I ever remember the service being down or unavailable all the time I’ve ever used it.
Instead, a large “sign up” button. Which, from experience, usually means that a company is interested in gathering user data beyond providing the advertised service.
I don't mind paying (I currently pay for feedly), but I'd like to know what I'm up for before signing up.
It's simple, the UI is clean, and it _just works_. Totally worth the subscription.
Note the author is located in the Russia Federation but is relocating to London so it's safe to sign up. Servers are hosted in Germany.
Services like this look good, but I'd like to avoid depending on a 3rd-party to keep it running. Fool me once...
Self hosting TTRSS and using the API to access it from third party software could be a solution if you don't like the official TTRSS web client.
There is an Android RSS client I've used that works with FreshRSS but I can't recall it.
I self host the following services to get RSS feeds for specific users/channels on closed (or less functional with RSS) platforms:
- Bibliogram (Instagram)
- Nitter (Twitter)
- Teddit (Reddit)
- RSSHub (Youtube and a bunch of other integrations)
Yeah the interface isn’t so important with a different feed reader actually being used.
I’m guessing there isn’t filtering available. I’ll look into it though.
What do you mean by "filtering"?
Or if you don’t care about having multiple devices synced you can simply use the app and have your local feed.
I am not sure how each of the apps are between one another. For pricing, I think Reeder is one time while Fiery Feed Reader is $15 a year for in app family subscription. Readkit is $10 a year or $40 lifetime.
All three apps are made by indie developers and not bigger corporations.
Yeah, if that’s just as easy, I don’t think they are for you. I have roughly 80 blogs and websites I get updates from, visiting them all the time to check for updates manually would be horrible.
I also care about comments a lot