Link tags: feeds

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

GetRSSFeed: RSS Feed Extractor & Finder for Websites, Blogs & Podcasts

This looks handy: a service to extract the RSS feed of a podcast (y’know—the thing that actually makes a podcast a podcast) from walled gardens that obfuscate the feed’s location: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

Full RSS feed

Oh, this is a very handy service from Paul—given the URL of an RSS feed that only has summaries, it will attempt to get the full post content from the HTML.

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

What RSS Needs

I love my feed reader:

Feed readers are an example of user agents: they act on behalf of you when they interact with publishers, representing your interests and preserving your privacy and security. The most well-known user agents these days are Web browsers, but in many ways feed readers do it better – they don’t give nearly as much control to sites about presentation and they don’t allow privacy-invasive technologies like cookies or JavaScript.

Also:

Feed support should be built into browsers, and the user experience should be excellent.

Agreed!

However, convincing the browser vendors that this is in their interest is going to be challenging – especially when some of them have vested interests in keeping users on the non-feed Web.

Podcast AP

Here’s a handy service that allows you to follow a Mastodon account that updates when a new podcast episode is released from any podcast you like.

RsS iS dEaD LOL

This is a wonderful service! Pop your Mastodon handle into this form and you can see which of your followers have websites with RSS feeds you can subscribe to.

MastoFeed - Send your RSS Feeds to Mastodon

This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.

Where have all the websites gone? – Chris Coyier

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

Six uses for Huffduffer

It’s so nice to see when someone else finds Huffduffer to be useful!

RSS Parrot

Here’s a handy service that allows you to use Mastodon as an RSS reader!

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever - The Verge

Wanna get angry all over again?

(Now do Geocities!)

I doubled-down on RSS – Eric Bailey

In which Eric says:

Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.

I’ll take it.

Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.

Investing in RSS - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com

Same:

Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has.

Mastodon is just blogs

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

This is spot-on:

Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.

Blogroll | Max Böck

A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow.

(Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.)

Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:

What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:

• build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
• see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
• easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads

(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)

Increasing the surface area of blogging

RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.

But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.

RSS - Chris Coyier

How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to respond to me, publish something linking to what I said. If I want to respond to you, I publish something linking to what you wrote. Old school. Good school. It’s high-effort, but I think the required effort is a positive thing for a social network. Forces you to think more.

gilest.org: What using RSS feeds feels like

• You’re the curator
• You decide what’s interesting
• You have more control over what you read and how
• It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web
• It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed

Spot on!

To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.

To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.

That’s what using RSS feeds feels like.