I read a new AlternativeTo blog post about the re-design of the Reeder app. Reeder, I read, is a feed reader for iOS and MacOS. I am not personally familiar with it because I do not use Apple hardware and even if I did, I would not opt for a proprietary feed reader. The design of the app looks interesting, however. As far as I can gather, Reeder was originally a traditional feed reader (that experience is apparently still available), but the re-design turns it into a feed reader with a more social media stream aesthetic. I would not opt for that design for reasons similar to those I offered for not wanting to use feed readers to follow social streams, but I nevertheless think the idea may be good for feed usage in general. Using feeds is good (regardless of the app), and offering people an interface they are more familiar with than that of a traditional feed reader may help increase uptake.
Tag: feed readers
FOSS Android Feed Reader Picks
The Privacy Dad blog published a good list of open source feed readers for Android. My current set-up is a Miniflux running as a PWA (I am running a Miniflux instance with Pikapods). But before I switched to Miniflux, I was using an open source local feed reader for Android that is not on The Privacy Dad list: Handy Reading. Handy Reading is a fork of the now-unmaintained Flym RSS and is a very nice feed reader. It can extract full text and allows the user to set how often each feed is checked. What sets it apart from similar solutions, however, is that you can save articles from outside your feeds into Handy Reading, making it a quasi read-it-later solution as well. To be sure, it is not as good a read-it-later tool as something like Omnivore, Wallabag or Shiori, but it is a nice addition to an all-around solid local open source feed reader.
Making Use of WordPress.com
This site and The New Leaf Journal are self-hosted WordPress sites. I have never really used WordPress.com. However, I made a WordPress.com account around the time I started The New Leaf Journal in 2020 for some reason I no longer remember (maybe it had to do with Gravatar, although that is moot now). I gave up on maintaing my now-former Osmosfeed aggregator on GitHub because figuring out why it was not building required too much time and effort for a project that I want to be low maintenance. Instead, I decided to finally take advantage of having the ability to make a free WordPress.com site. Behold, my free WordPress.com aggregator site that shows off my supreme full site editor skills: The Pressed Leaf Reader.
Avoiding Feed Reader Overrun
I came across an interesting blog post by Evan Sheeran noting that it is easy for to become overwhelmed by new feed articles using an RSS/ATOM Feed Reader. He stated that “[t]he more feeds to which you subscribe, or the more prolific some of the authors are, the more of a commitment opening your feed reader becomes.” I recommend reading his original post where he considers what an alternative may look like. For anyone facing similar issues, I also recommend my own recent article on organizing feeds. I separate feeds by update frequency, with the three main grounds being Daily, Weekly, and Sporadic. Separating feeds with less frequent updates makes it easier to stay abreast of their new posts. I also linked to other systems for organizing feeds since my method works for my feed collection, but may not make sense for every feed collection. In using a feed reader or RSS/ATOM feeds generally, I encourage people to ask themselves why they are doing so. I use a feed reader and read-it-later tools so I can collect articles and media from websites and bloggers I want to follow without needing to go to each site individually or outsource my reading to an algorithm. To the extent I organize my feed reading so I never end up with 2,000 unread articles, it is so that I can keep tabs on good internet writing. As I noted in my feed organizing survey, not everyone has the exact same goal or style that I do. Understanding your purpose in organizing feeds goes a long way toward keeping your feed reader from being overrun (for lack of a better term).