The Hidden Blog

As it turns out, I do have a hostname.

RSS is luckily not dead yet

Published on April 10, 2020

I’m a big proponent of using RSS feeds for your daily news intake instead of relying on algorithmically shuffled news streams for a while now. This works especially well if you want to follow smaller blogs and sites with irregular posting schedules that would otherwise just not show up in any algorithmically sorted timelines or get drowned out in the noise of the daily news cycle.

While it’s true that RSS support is probably not growing these days it’s still around for a surprisingly amount of sites. Shockingly even Medium.com offers RSS feeds, you just have to construct the URL yourself. Most likely this is done so you have to use their proprietary “Follow” feature and not use an open standard.

The current arrangement I’m using consists of three parts:

  • A hosted feed reader and source of truth
  • Apps that sync with that through the Fever API offered by the feed reader
  • Browser extension to help with subscribing and identifying feeds on websites

Hosted feed reader

My current selection of tools hasn’t changed in a long time and I’m still fairly happy with it. The main source of truth for all my feeds is Miniflux. It’s a self-hosted feed reader, written in Go that I run in Docker on my server. I’m a happy user for years already and if you don’t want the hassle of hosting it yourself you can also support development and let them do the job with the hosted version.

It’s very stable, light on resources and offers a Fever compatible API which makes it possible to use any app that supports Fever to sync with it.

How Fever became the one of the “standards” of syncing is still not clear to me. Do you know?

Alternatively there’s the low effort hosted (paid) services: Feedbin and Feedly. I haven’t tried them but they both have been around for a while now and seem reputable.

Apps

I currently use Reeder on macOS and iOS but I’m very much looking forward to switching to NewsNetWire once syncing via the Fever API is supported. It’s an open source re-issue of the classic NewsNetWire (History & Announcement) developed by the original author Brent Simmons.

Safari Extension

Being a Safari user I also found a neat extension called “RSS Button for Safari”. It’s main feature is to add a button to the browser that detects RSS feeds offered by websites and makes it easy to subscribe with a few clicks. In case you also use Miniflux just select the option “Custom URL” in the extension’s settings window and set it to the following URL. Clicking on the “+” button in the extension will then take you directly to the “New Subscription” section of your Miniflux instance.

https://rss.example.com/bookmarklet?uri=%@

Remember when this was a standard feature of every browser and was located right in the address bar?