Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too:
Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content on the original site. I think this defeats the point of providing RSS, where a big benefit is that the reader can customise how the posts display in their feed reader to improve their reading experience.
I absolutely love Khoi Vinh’s writing, but have long been surprised that his feed is truncated. Barely even excerpts. WHY KHOI WHY?!
Laura linked up lire as a reader, and I’d never seen that one before. It’s apparently got good screenreader support.
Louis Lazaris wrote Front-end RSS Feeds (2020 Edition). It has OPML files that are in big groups of feeds that you’ll be subscribed to once their imported into a feed reader (some have that as an option). There is also just a big list too.
Louis likes NewsBlur.
I’m still on my Feedbin + NetNewsWire kick. NetNewsWire for iOS just dropped as well. I installed it and like it OK so far, but I think I still prefer Reeder on iOS which also syncs with Feedbin nicely.
I haven’t had a chance to play with Unread 2 yet for iOS, but I love the idea that it “automatically determines which feeds contain only article summaries” and goes and fetches the rest of the content from the site for you.
I assume the main reasons of forcing people to load the site after all are ads and tracking required to satisfy ad companies
But to be honest… do they really think people using RSS readers don’t block ads and trackers anyway?
As for my reader of choice, after learning to use RSS with Opera and it’s great M2 and then moving to back to Firefox and learning to use Newsfox my sources list and backlog both grew big enough to cause severe slowdowns of the latter one so I picked up then already abandoned Smart RSS and tweaked to be my daily driver, it works in Chromium clones and Gecko based browsers down to 56 so all the people who care about power, not benchmarks, can make use of it too
I, like Louis, have been using NewsBlur since Google Reader died. I’m still amazed sometimes at how many sites launch nowadays that forget to even add RSS. The excuse I usually hear is that they don’t get big subscriber numbers there – as opposed to social. I think this is a mistake. First, the folks who do any sort of aggregation (like I do for newsletters, but also to share on social) tend to rely on RSS. Second, social is too ephemeral that it’s easy to miss things – if I subscribe to your site it’s because I find it important and I intend to read it.
No mention of Feedly? Am I missing something?
It wasn’t my intention to list every RSS reader in the world in this post.
It’s interesting because while I was researching the front-end feeds list, I found the same problem, that a lot of sites were missing an RSS feed. But in almost all cases, I just had to poke around a little in the source code, view subscribe pages, mess with the URL, etc, and I’d find the feed. In one case I just asked someone if they had a feed, and they did, it just wasn’t advertised. Even for a big site like dev.to the feed is apparenlty nowhere to be found, and even my RSS Chrome plugin can’t find it. But, lo and behold, it’s there.
Overall there were only a few sites that I couldn’t find feeds for, it just took a lot more effort to find some.
WordPress and Medium are easy to figure out even if there is no proper
linktag in codeUnfortunately there are crazy sites that use some CMS but instead of using built-in news system that provides them with RSS for free they spin out own one so the feed is there but it’s empty…