I Decided to Invest a Bit More in RSS

I'm not denying it — I'm online a lot. If I'm not by my laptop (or PC), my phone isn't terribly far away. I like keeping a tab as to the going-ons of the Internet. However, I'm routinely not a fan of how a feed, algorithmic or not, can keep you arrested in place. The knowledge of something else coming down the pipeline has me eager to see what's next. This is where RSS (or Atom, JSON Feed — whatever format you want to use) comes into play.

FreshRSS I was hunting for a RSS reader that worked with Newsflash; my preferred reader on my computer. That's especially because I can turn off WiFi and read offline — one of the underrated features of computers these days. FreshRSS came to mind as an option and I picked it because it uses SQLite; something that makes backups incredibly easy and has decent support for extensions (none of which I had a pressing need for).

Adding the bookmarklet made the act of adding feeds quite simple. I did have some issues attempting to add feeds from WordPress sites like In These Times; something I'll have to look into. The error from the logs looks like this:

I could keep looking into this but I didn't care enough at the moment to do so. So far, though, using this with Newsflash and for my phone, Readrops. I don't want to read a lot on my phone; I have my eReader for reading long-form content, perhaps someone will produce that.

I'm eager to report back on this experience but so far, I've been loving it. An underlying ambition is to have something akin to a social reader. The logic for building one is quite clear, however, the interface and experience is something I'd need to explore, and as such, I'm throwing myself into this to develop that. One thing I managed to quickly fix is how my personal site advertises feeds. Now you should be able to just drop any URL from my site and find all of the feeds I provide.

To RSS, ATOM and all its friends!