Consuming media - RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Table of Contents

What it is?

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/newsflash-gtk-feed-reader-linux

RSS is what the web was supposed to be about, then Social Media showed up and started walling the whole thing off.

It is an open-standard with no centralization, that is why they’re trying to destroy it.

The beauty of it is that you can subscribe to all the different websites you like and see their new content all in one place. It’s a little bit like social-media before social-media, and without being censored and controlled by huge corporations with agendas and slants.

Why not just go directly to the webpage? Because then you have to do that for a dozen or more webpages a day, and scroll through whatever differing interface each has, just to read your headlines and a few articles. With RSS you open one program to get a quick overview of a dozen or more websites worth of new headlines, read a few articles, and you’re done in one. Much easier…

There’s more to it than that. The internet before the one you know today was decentralized. Everyone had their own websites, and no one controlled what anyone else could show or say on those websites. It was absolute freedom.

Then came centralization. “Platforms” started to arise, and become the only things people used. Instead of your company/brand or even personal website you had to be on Facebook, Google/Youtube, Instagram, etc. Soon after that they started having persistent identity via logging in with FB, Google, etc. And then they started asking for you phone number for 2 factor authentication… that’s not what it’s for at all. It’s actually about tying your online ID’s to your personal phone number.

Now Twitter, Youtube, Facebook censor what people can say, and even ban them. If they don’t like the book you wrote they’ll remove it from Amazon. Digital book burning. Total control over information, and the narratives around it. Even the search engines hide things that companies or governments want them to hide.

RSS was a centralized way to see things you were interested in from sources you subscribed to because you wanted to see more. This model could be adapted for the current internet to end the control over information.

And some people will read this and not even know what I’m talking about, but the other large portion of people will know exactly what I mean. I used to love Google. I thought they were the most amazing company ever, and then I realized that they had so much data and control over data that they could greatly influence society. But I didn’t expect to see them turn on a dime and start doing it outright. It’s funny because it happened right around the time they removed “Don’t Be Evil” as their company model haha.

Reading material

  1. https://rss.com/blog/how-do-rss-feeds-work/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
  5. https://freshrss.org/index.html
  6. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss/
  7. https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-find-rss-feed-url/
  8. https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-rss-feeds/

RSS Client Applications

  1. Liferea
    1. Stands for Linux Feed Reader
    2. According to some folks on the internet, Liferea has better functionality though the user interface needs some serious updating
    3. preferred reader right now
    4. https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea
    5. In Debian, sudo apt install liferea
    6. In Linux Mint, use software manager to install it
    7. The OPML that is exported from this is beautiful compared to that exported from Newsflash - single line for each entry
    8. Features
      1. Liferea can download and save feeds from your favorite website to read offline.
      2. Support for Podcasts.
      3. Support for search folders, which allows users to save searches.
      4. Syncs with TinyRSS
    9. Gotchas
      1. Importing and Exporting opml
        1. Before importing an opml, delete all the folders in Liferea. If not, it will create nested structures for the same folders.
        2. When exporting, click on the main folder and export it.
  2. newsflash - a stand-alone package for Arch Linux
    1. https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk 
      pacman -S newsflash
    2. The UI is nice.
    3. But when it comes to functionality, liferea seems to be better than newsflash.
    4. When the list of feeds gets bigger, newsflash seems to be struggling while liferea handled it without any issues.
    5. Features
      1. Fullscreen Videos
      2. Advanced option to disable image autoloading
      3. Custom Content Width and Syntax highlighting in Article View.
      4. Support for web-based feed accounts like Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, feedbin, etc.
  3. Browser features
    1. Many browsers offer their own implementations of “News” feature and we can customize the source of “News” to add our RSS links.
    2. Chrome offers an RSS reader of sorts with “Web Feed.”
    3. brave-browser has “brave news”
    4. OperaOne has a feature just like it
  4. elfeed - an emacs package
    1. https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed
    2. https://github.com/remyhonig/elfeed-org
    3. https://slugelisp.ahungry.com/package/elfeed-web
    4. How to remove sources from elfeed?
      1. After installing elfeed and adding some sources, how to remove some of the sources?
      2. Close emacs. If you delete the database or the contents of elfeed directory before closing emacs, emacs would rewrite the index back in ~/.elfeed, which means that the removed source (and the feeds) would still be there the next time you open emacs/elfeed.
      3. Delete contents from elfeed directory (most times, it is either in the root folder or it will be .emacs.d/elfeed)
    5. How to read articles from a single website in the collection of rss sources?
    6. How to make elfeed work with an OPML file?
      1. Use the function elfeed-load-opml
      2. If we use an OPML file, we can use that same file with multiple clients (in addition to elfeed).
    7. How to copy url of an entry in the default mode?
      1. In Elfeed’s default mode,
      2. y : Copies the URL of the selected entry to the clipboard.
      3. b : Opens the URL in your default browser.
      4. RET : Views the selected entry in a buffer.
  5. newsboat - a Linux package
    1. A pure terminal based application
    2. I couldn’t figure out the keybindings to navigate in it.
    3. Configuration:
      1. https://newsboat.org/releases/2.10/docs/newsboat.html
      2. https://opensource.com/article/20/2/newsboat
  6. Feedly website
    1. Supports free accounts for individuals
    2. Cons
      1. In my OPML file, one of the categories had about 50 links. When I imported this OMPL file into feedly, it truncated the list and it was showing a subset of the list in the user interface.
      2. For some other categories, it didn’t import at all - because there is a limit on the number of folders that are supported in the free tier.
      3. I didn’t even realize this until I exported the OPML from feedly and compared it to my initial OMPL.
      4. Eliminating links just because it doesn’t support all the features in the free tier, and not telling the customer about it, is not good.
  7. Fluent Reader
    1. Fluent Reader is a modern desktop client built using electron, react, and fluent UI. It focuses on a rich user experience while also taking care of the privacy.
    2. Features
      1. Ability to sync across devices
      2. Cross-platform support
      3. Attractive user interface
  8. Akregator
    1. Akregator is KDE’s feed reader which is easy to use and powerful enough to provide the latest updates from news sites, blogs, and RSS/Atom enabled websites.
  9. GFeeds
    1. GFeeds is the feed reader from GNOME. This is a very straightforward and minimal feed reader, built with speed and simplicity in mind.
    2. No big fancy features
    3. Minimal and Fast
  10. QuiteRSS
    1. Lots of features. There are additional features like proxy integration, ad blocker, integrated browser, and system tray integration. It’s easier to update feeds by setting up a timer to refresh.
  11. RSSGuard
    1. RSSGuard is an interesting lightweight RSS reader built using the Qt framework. It supports syncing with some web-based RSS services like Tiny Tiny RSS, Nextcloud News, and more.

RSS feed finder or creator

  1. Create RSS Feeds from almost any webpage https://rss.app/rss-feed

Helpful websites

  1. Top 100 Stock RSS Feeds https://rss.feedspot.com/stock_rss_feeds/
  2. https://themeisle.com/blog/rss-feeds-list/
  3. https://rss.feedspot.com/business_rss_feeds/

RSS feeds for subreddits

Reddit already provides RSS feeds for subreddits. Just add .rss to the end of the subreddit.

Examples

  1. https://www.reddit.com/r/feedly.rss
  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought.rss

Source:

  1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/wiki/rss/

Tags

  1. Who killed Google Reader?
  2. It’s Time for an RSS Revival
  3. An interesting look back at why Google Reader was killed 10 years ago

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