Rss is brilliant.
An overview of my consumption of rss feeds:
- Miniflux as rss reader
- Separate tags for news and aggregators that don't display on my home page
- Go through all the new rss feed entries that are not news/aggregators. Read ones that I can read quickly there and then, send long ones to Wallabag to read later.
Below is a more detailed explanation of my setup.
Miniflux
I've started to use miniflux now. It's pretty good software.
I spent the weekend trying to find the right rss reader. At first I wanted something that just runs on my desktop and i could open at any time. To be honest, on Linux there are no real lightweight GUI applications for this. I've used newsboat in the past but did I found I was opening most posts in a browser anyway to get the markup. I even made some slopware GUI application.
Then I realised that rss can replacing scrolling on my phone so I then wanted a mobile application.
I would need sync between the 2 and I did not want to make an account and pay for rss so I decided to host a web application. That being miniflux.
The software is nice enough and I don't have any real complaints yet. On mobile you install it as a PWA which I've never really done before. I used to add links to my homepage on my phone in the before times to internet forums but this behaves exactly like a native app would, even down to a splash screen.
The only downside with the pwa is that it does not cache entries. This makes using it offline impossible. That took me down the next path
I've also configured it to display newest entries first instead of oldest. That's the only sane way for me to do it.
Wallabag
Bitch to install, php errors out the wazoo, remis repo makes a comeback and how I learned to stop worrying and love the container.
Wallabag is self hosted pocket with integrations into everything. It crucially has an app that can talk to a self hosted instance that can read things offline.
Failed to install on rocky linux got errors everywhere so I decided to reverse proxy a container with apache. Simple enough, just download the docker compose up dash d it and voila, it works! But it did not work. Ended up churning through bugs for an hour.
It does work great though, got it on my phone and as a web extension and it integrates with Miniflux nicely.
It does seem to not accept certain posts with a strange date format, there is a bug on the github that's been open for 2 years about it :(
App store funnys
Wallabag has a app on the google play store. The average reviews are not great. People are expecting it just to work, not something you have to host yourself. The app does make it clear that you have to do that but I guess they lack some of the open source "rustic" vibes so it looks to professional and must just work!
Discovery
This is the fun part, where can I find rss feeds that I like?
Hacker News posts, if I like the blog I follow it
bearblog discovery Bear blog is a blog hosting service that has thoughtful users and this link is an aggregator to trending posts
Then from there, people tend to link blogs they like, plenty of people on the bearblog aggregator make response blogs to people, from there you can find more.
indieweb carnival People blogging together on the same topic, indiweb is a nice resource in general
this blogroll directory A bunch of links to blogs, also can subscribe to all the blogs there and stick them in your rss reader if you are crazy (or just put them into an aggregator tag)