Tag: Feed Reader

Bookmarked Feed readers/content aggregators – The Dan MacKinlay family of variably-well-considered enterprises (danmackinlay.name)

I have been told to do this through Twitter or Facebook, but, seriously… no. Those are systems designed to waste time with stupid distractions in order to benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles.. Stop that.

Dan MacKinlay reflects on the use of RSS and Feed Readers to summarise and condense information. He also provides a list of tools to use to capture feeds:

Feedity generates feed from sites that don’t understand content aggregators.

More generally, web scraping tools can do this. For example, Scrapy i whose companionn project scrapy-rss converts weird sites into RSS

via Chris Aldrich

Liked https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/07/55763758/ by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

To me IndieWeb needs to have a focus on allowing the user to keep and own big portions of their data. Things like read status and old articles history should be owned by the user and not by a third party. Readers that do this are just as bad as Google Reader which took that data down when they closed.

Replied to From Following Posts and Blogrolls (Following Pages) with OPML to Microsub Servers and Readers (BoffoSocko)

In the most ideal world, I’d love to be able to use the Post Kinds Plugin to create follow posts (see my examples). This plugin is already able to generally use bookmarklet functionality to pull in a variety of meta data using the Parse This code which is also built into Post Kinds.


It would be nice if these follow posts would also copy their data into the Links Manager (to keep things DRY), so that the blogroll and the OPML files are automatically updated all at once.

Thank you for documenting so much about this topic Chris. I too would like the ability to incorporate Follow posts into my list. Really should get back to updating my feeds too.
Replied to http://johnjohnston.info/blog/inoreaders-new-plan-will-leave-90-of-users-unaffected-i/ by john john (johnjohnston.info)

@inoreader’s new plan will leave 90% of users unaffected. I am in the other 10% not sure I should to upgrade, it is quite a jump from current $14.99 to $49.99; slash my feeds, & lose RSS feeds; or take opportunity explore other RSS services.

I feel that I get enough worth out of Inoreader and am not yet ready to jump to a full IndieWeb Reader. I still prefer Inoreader to Feedly. Guess I will see.
Replied to Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’…

I have been wondering how I could improve my workflow associated with Inoreader. Obviously I did not wonder enough.

Currently, I use URL Forwarder as many of my posts (like this one) are composed during my daily commute on my phone. I guess I could use IFTTT, but there is something There is something about IFTTT that leaves me feeling unsettled. I am therefore unwilling to use the platform for anything that
really matters to me. I am not sure if I want to pay for Zapier, but have been thinking about it, especially after listening a recent episode of the Automators Podcast:

Another challenge I find is that some of the features you have touched upon do not seem available via the mobile app. Maybe then this ties my hand.

Replied to Where’s my Net dashboard? by Jon UdellJon Udell (blog.jonudell.net)

I’m not sure that a next-gen reader can solve the same problems that my first-gen reader did, in the same ways. Still, I can’t help but envision a dashboard that subscribes to, and manages notifications from, all my sources. It seems wrong that the closest thing to that, once more, is email. Plugging the social silos into a common reader seems like the obvious thing. But if that were effective, we’d all be using FlowReader or something like it.

This reminds me of Aaron Parecki’s work on an indie feed reader.
Replied to Digg Shrugg by Alan LevineAlan Levine (CogDogBlog)

Born as the bastard child of Google Reader, Digg’s own spawn came into being June 26, 2013 as a ray of hope for the RSS fanatics, aiming to offer the same feature set as the dead Google parent.

Digg Reader lived a placid life, not quite firmly connected with it’s parent’s products (whatever they are) but performed a yeoman’s service for the dwindling few who believed in the choice of news and information sources, rather than sucking up to the hose of some algorithm.

But Digg Reader’s health was failing as many noticed the dwindling reliability and upkeep of the mobile app. It’s death was mercifully quick, it did not suffer long, yet left most wondering in its wake why it was even sick.

I totally get your point about feed readers not actually holding our information as such, I think that Inoreader takes this a step further with the ability to subscribe to feeds which can easily be stored in WordPress. Maybe there is a potential of a linksplot?
Replied to Digg is going to kill Digg Reader; what should we do now? by Bryan Alexander (Bryan Alexander)

Over to you, dear readers. Which way forward for RSS, both in the big picture and in the practical sense of which reader to try?

I am using Inoreader and love the ability subscribe to a feed. I therefore store my OPML on my site. This allows me to add and delete feeds, as well as maintain a permanent backup. The only catch I have found is that the feed does not seem to auto-refresh, so if you delete a link from your blog and therfore your OPML, then you need to remove it from Inoreader too.

I am keeping an eye on Aaron Parecki’s #Indieweb Reader too.

Bookmarked Feed reader revolution by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

It’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media

Aldrich outlines some of the current problems associated with social media. This includes reducing external access (see Medium) in an effort to control the content. For at the end of the day, they are simply content management systems. What is needed though is an integrated reader that allows for the ability to easily interact. Enter the #IndieWeb and the missing pieces to the puzzle, such as webmentions and micropub.

In a different post, Aldrich extends this discussion by breaking down his workflow. He explains how he uses of Inoreader to sort through content and then saves content to his site. He also uses Calibre and Kindle to manage documents.

Adding to this discussion, Aaron Parecki has released an IndieWeb Reader which builds on these pieces and processes for an integrated solution. I think that the challenge moving forward is the simplicity of such solutions for Generation 3 and 4.

Replied to PressForward as an IndieWeb WordPress-based RSS Feed Reader & Pocket/Instapaper Replacement by Author Chris AldrichAuthor Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

PressForward was originally intended for journalists and news organizations to aggregate new content, add it to their newsroom workflow, and then use it to publish new content. From what I can see it’s also got a nice following in academia as a tool for aggregating content for researchers focused on a particular area.

It only took a minute or two of looking at PressForward to realize that it had another off-label use case: as a spectacular replacement for read-later type apps!

Chris, I stumbled upon your post on Press Forward whilst searching around your site. I really like the sound of it, especially in regards to better owning bookmarks and reading. Is that what you  use for your marginalia?

I feel wedded to Inoreader/Pocket at this point in time. However, I might spin up a new instance of WordPress and test it there. Can see myself using it to support deeper research one day.