Tag: rss

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Let us start October off on the right foot with an exciting new edition of the Pook-Emu Bee Links.

Oh no, whatever will I do?

1 | Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots (Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. Sep. 30, 2026.)
One may think that your favorite (I hope) feed proponent would be outraged about Reddit discontinuing its RSS feeds. To paraphrase the Reddit community: “Well ackshully….” Why in the world would I want to contaminate my feed collection with Reddit?

2 | Citi Bike user reveals outrageous ‘hidden tax’ slapped onto every e-bike (Aurielle Weiss for the New York Post. Sep. 26, 2026.)
These lunatics are complaining about the speed limit. The fees can’t be high enough.

Kitty

3 | Bronx Zoo welcomes adorable snow leopard cub threatened by extinction (Natalie O’Neill for the New York Post. Sep. 30, 2026.)
I too welcome the new snow leopard.

4 | Workers free kittens from shredder that could have ‘obliterated’ them in purr-fect rescue mission (Steven Vago for the New York Post. Sep. 28, 2026.)
A very timely kitten rescue.

Starcents

5 | Starbucks to close 250 stores: ‘Difficult decision’ (Anders Hagstrom for Fox Business. Sep. 24, 2026.)
I have never been a big burnt coffee fan, but there was once a time when Starbucks was clearing the bar many people

6 | Starbucks Japan releases new Pikachu Honey Cream Latte into the wild for new Pokémon collaboration (Oona McGee for SoraNews24. Sep. 29, 2026.)
I wouldn’t drink it because it looks like a year’s worth of sugar. But Starbucks did a surprisingly decent job of converting the Pikachu aesthetic into a drink.

Self-Hosting

7 | Radiology practices that own their imaging equipment less likely to face closure (Marty Stempniak for Radiology Business. Sep. 30, 2026.)
That checks out.

8 | Self Hosting Passwords (Chuck Carroll. May 20, 2026.)
He uses KeePassXC and Syncthing. He is a smart man. I hubly say that because I too use KeePassXC and Syncthing. With that being said, I would not necessarily recommend our combo to “normies.”

Photograph

9 | Sheep Tree (Jan Ulicki on Lens Culture. May 20, 2025.)
Great photo, baaaa.

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I discovered two new bots in my server logs last week: RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot. They come from RSS Amplifier and Brisk News respectively. Bot sites are built by Profullstack, Inc. I discovered that RSS Amplifier, unbeknownst to me, had been crawling New Leaf Journal’s ATOM feed and re-publishing (albeit they would not describe it as such) the entire contents of my article under the RSS Amplifier banner (note it appears it took entire articles because I offer full-text feeds; it had truncated entries for sites that do not offer full text feeds). While the articles are attributed with links back to my original source, I do not approve of wholesale re-publishing (as should have been clear from my About Page). Worse yet, RSS Amplifier describes its purpose in part as making articles from around the web readily available for AI crawlers (live About Page) and they sell access to their data (live Training Data page). Brisk News appears to host articles from around the web with AI summaries, but there is less information about the project on site.

I present this information for the consideration of my fellow webmasters. I took it upon myself to block both RSS Amplifier and Brisk News at the server level and have a pending take-down request with RSS Amplifier. Alternatively, a webmaster who wants to be part of the collection may want to test whether the team responds to requests about data handling (RSS Amplifier does insist you can make a request to be in the directory but not have your site’s data sold, but I have my doubts on how that would work in practice). In any event, for those who are interested in learning more:

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We have a second consecutive warm day in New York City. We also have a third consecutive day of Pook-Emu Bee links.

1. Seven Myths About the Iran War (Michael Doran for Tablet Magazine. April 13, 2026.)

Good start. Hard to choose just seven.

2. Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them. (Austin Ginder for Anchor. April 9, 2026.)

WordPress should send notifications to webmasters whenever an installed plugin from the standard WordPress repository changes hands.

3. Sam Altman’s house targeted in second attack; two suspects arrested (John Owen Lamb for The San Francisco Standard. April 12, 2026.)

Scary stuff and good thing both attacks failed (these sorts of types are often not too competent). Let us hope the perpetrators are dealt with appropriately and quickly to minimize the number of other deranged individuals who may take inspiration.

4. Reflecting on Microsoft Windows Vista in 2026 (Maya Posch for Hackaday. April 9, 2026.)

Say what one will but my Vista experience was fine. I’d take it over whatever is going on with Windows 11 these days.

5. Failing the Fix (2026) (U.S. PIRG Education Fund. April 7, 2026.)

I won’t spoil everything but I will note that having recently operated on a 2006-07 Macbook, I can confirm that Apple’s failing grade is nothing new.

6. You Should Be Using Reddit on Your RSS Reader (David Nield for Lifehacker. April 10, 2026.)

That is an interesting suggestion but I counter with “use an RSS reader and don’t use Reddit at all.”

7. Amazon is ending support for Kindle devices from 2012 and earlier (Brad Linder for Liliputing. April 7, 2026.)

But not all is lost for people with ancient Kindles: “You can still ‘transfer personal documents’ to an unsupported Kindle using a USB cable, although you may need to use a third-party tool like Calibre to convert some eBooks into a format that your Kindle recognizes.” Calibre does handle conversions to MOBI.

8. MLB pitcher Merrill Kelly says California tax rate swayed decision to reject Padres’ free agency offer (Chantz Martin for Fox News. February 28, 2026.)

Today reminds him why he made that call in free agency.

9. A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction (Retraction Watch. March 3, 2026.)

But other than that, the reports were accurate.

(HT to Pixy Misa for links 2 and 3.)

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Favorited Improve the RSS experience of your blog readers by Jatan (journal.jatan.space)
Introduce people to RSS readers in an accessible way and link to such an explainer on your /feeds page. Both cases shouldn’t assume people know or understand the term. When introducing people you know to RSS readers, don’t assume how or what they read and consume on the Web. The concept of an agnostic feed reader can be hard to understand or appreciate at first so make sure you understand the person’s habits and needs before suggesting anything.

Jatan, writing on his Journal J blog, offers good advice for webmasters who want to promote feed subscriptions for their projects. Having tried to pitch people on feeds in real life, I concur entirely with his assessment that explaining what feeds are and how one should use them are good ideas. I do this on NLJ with my Feed Directory (could use a refresher) and Feed introduction article. For people who are not inclined to write their own introduction to feeds, there are plenty around the web (including mine, I humbly submit). I would also recommend explaining the benefits of using feeds and feed readers. See, for example, my articles on using feeds and read-it-later tools and my positive case for feeds. The only point I would offer a point of caution on is recommendation two: “Offer direct subscription links for various popular feed readers on your blog’s /feeds page.” In general, people who could use those direct subscription links already know about feeds, feed readers, and the benefits thereof. While I do not oppose the idea, I would be very careful about ensuring that the framing does not inadvertently give people who are not familiar with feeds and feed readers the impression that using them requires signing up for an external service or hosting their own solution.

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Replied to Why This Blog Uses RSS (Not a Newsletter) by Sebastian Sastre (Selective Creativity)
I’m not against newsletters. They work for many goals. But for this blog — a conceptual stream, not a growth funnel — the goal is different. I want you to read the ideas in full, in a place you choose, without a middleman deciding what you see or how.

I came across an interesting take by Sebastian Sastre on why he uses an RSS feed instead of a newsletter for his blog. I agree with the feed-first position. However, I personally recommend using both. Recommend feeds as a first option but also have a newsletter (which is a publication unto itself beyond just sharing links). I use Buttondown, which is a good service (I think it avoids some of the pitfalls of the services Mr. Sastre notes) and also allows people to follow the newsletter itself via RSS. For RSS specifically, I would also recommend telling people how they can subscribe to RSS via email using Blogtrottr or similar services.

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I use a feed reader as my portal to online writing and media. Occasionally, sites that I otherwise enjoy become fixated with something I do not care about. I wrote about having this issue last year at the height of the Palworld fad. Yesterday, an article popped up on my feed list which reminded me of another annoying topic which is covered too often.

Miniflux screenshot from phone showing seven article titles. The one at issue is "Venice breaks Ground on Controversial Banksy Mural Restoration"

I do not care about Banksy. Nothing will ever make me care about Banksy short of him tagging my neighborhood. Banksy and the outlets can pursue social media shares (or whatever compels all the Banksy coverage) without me now that I added a global filter rule to Miniflux to ensure save me a few mark as read swipes or clicks.

Of course, I subscribe to myself in Miniflux, so I decided censor the title as to not block my own wonderful writing from my newsfeed.

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Replied to RSS feeds by Manuel Moreale (manuelmoreale.com)
A non-trivial percentage of the people subscribed to both my blog-to-email newsletter and the People and Blogs newsletter are using one of those tools that automatically convert newsletters into RSS feeds. Wonderful tools, great tools, useful tools, I’m not debating that. But for the love of all things digital, all that content is already available as native RSS feeds so WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING THROUGH ALL THESE EXTRA STEPS??

I follow Manuel Moreale’s blog using its RSS feed (he also maintains Ye Olde Blogroll). Because I follow him via RSS, I saw his July 16, 2025 post titled RSS Feeds in my feed reader. In that post, he noted a humorous discovery that some readers subscribe to his site newsletter using a tool which converts newsletters into RSS feeds. He reasonably asked, “WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING THROUGH ALL THESE EXTRA STEPS??” I suspect there are two factors at play. Firstly, some readers may see the word “newsletter” and incorrectly assume that this means there is no feed. That is one reason I wrote an article about Substack’s native RSS feeds back in 2021. I also make a point of reminding readers of my newsletter that it has a native RSS feed. Secondly, it is possible that some people who use feed readers and do not have a browser plugin or extension which shows discovered feeds may rely on visual cues to see if there is a feed. The Manuel Moreale blog notes the existence of its RSS feed (with a link) in a “What should you do next?” section under each post, where it is bundled with information about how to support the author, other places he can be found, and other notes. While no one can say that the RSS feed is not clearly indicated, not everyone reads the fine print.

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I came across Gautam krishna R’s blog-post-workflow repository on GitHub last night (being January 2, 2025). In short, it is a GitHub workflow for fetching RSS feeds and adding them to a GitHub profile README.md file. I created a profile repository (I had been meaning to for a while) and added three feeds: My ATOM feeds for this site and The New Leaf Journal and my Buttondown newsletter feed. Everything worked, but symbols in headlines for this feed and New Leaf Journal were being rendered oddly. I tried switching both WordPress feeds from ATOM to RSS. Now everything works perfectly. It is possible that I could have fixed the formatting using the available configuration options, but for this purpose (for mosy purposes, really), there is no difference between the WordPress RSS and ATOM feeds. You can see my GitHub profile with the feeds here.

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Favorited 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.

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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.

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Replied to 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.

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Replied to 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).

Bookmarked 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.