Thanking my RSS readers by Jeremy Herve (jeremy.hu)

Found a cool message on Kev’s blog about appreciating RSS readers, so I decided to add something similar to mine. This WordPress snippet displays a random welcome messages to all RSS readers.

I came across a fun idea on WordPress developer Jeremy Herve’s blog (I previously wrote about using one of his plugins) to include a welcome message with RSS feed items thanking subscribers. I decided to add a small thank you note to my feed footers using Jeff Starr’s Simple Custom Content plugin, which I already used to ensure that all feed items conclude with a link to the original and a copyright notice. I decided to make my thank you message focus primarily on thanking people for subscribing, but added a note that feeds are the best way to subscribe.

I read an interesting post that appeared on Hacker News page 1 about creating full text and full archive RSS feeds. One method in its toolbox is constructing feeds from Wayback Machine captures of the RSS feed. That idea never occurred to me. Out of curiosity, I looked at Wayback Archive captures of The New Leaf Journal’s main RSS feed. Our feed was captured for the first time on August 15, 2020 (notre I published our first article on April 27 of that year). Between then and now, it was captured 41 additional times, seemingly most consistently in 2022.

Ten Open Source RSS News Readers for Smartphones by The Privacy Dad (Welcome to The Privacy Dad's Blog!)
Ten open source RSS news reader apps for smartphones ranked by positive user experience.

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.

RSS? (Evan Sheehan)
RSS can even become a burden. A feed reader is another inbox, and like all inboxes you have very little control over how much stuff gets put in there. The 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 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).

Email newsletters via RSS by Dan Q (Dan Q)
No, I won't subscribe to your newsletter... except by using my RSS reader (and a clever feature of OpenTrashMail)!

I primarily use feeds to stay on top of interesting authors and websites. I seldom need to deal with newsletters because almost everything I follow (including a few Substack and Buttondown newsletters and the newsletter for Tablet Magazine) also have RSS feeds. But there are a few exceptions, notably some of the Real Clear network of sites. I started using Omnivore to cover this use case since it supports subscribing to newsletters from inside its app with its own email addresses. Blogger Dan Q here wrote about using an Open Trash Mail instance to handle newsletter to RSS conversions. Apparently one can subscribe to these disposable addresses via RSS. I’ll keep this in mind for future reference.