newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
It’s about time we had a website like About Feeds
Of course, there is a subreddit for RSS. Of course, someone there was able to provide me a link to the kind of explainer page I was musing about just a few days ago.
To quote myself:
I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page website that anyone with RSS could link to. “Welcome to RSS. Here’s why you should use it and how.”
Matt Webb saw the same need and went ahead and did it with About Feeds, a web page whose sole purpose is to give beginners the why and how of RSS. I sent him an email giving my thanks.
Matt also has a blog post explaining how RSS could be improved, and I found myself agreeing with pretty much all of it, especially this part:
If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it.
With help from Claude, I was able to create a nicely formatted preview of the Newsonaut RSS feed, along with basic instructions on how to subscribe. And, for the uninitiated, a link to About Feeds
Unfortunately, the technology used for styling feeds is no longer supported by Chrome and will likely be deprecated soon by all the major browsers. They give technical reasons, but it really does feel sometimes like RSS is being marginalized in favour of silos inspired by the profit motive.
Not to be deterred, I created a modal instead. It doesn’t have a preview of the feed, but it has the same simple instructions plus a link to About Feeds. Click the RSS button in the top navigation to see it in action.
I would like to see other creative efforts to make RSS more approachable. This is my humble attempt. Maybe there are better ideas out there.
More posts in the RSS category
Friday, May 22, 2026
RSS is awesome, so let’s make it easy
I’ve been trying to think of a better experience for people who click on an RSS link or button.
It currently seems like gate-keeping. If you know what RSS is, you’ll figure it out. Everyone else will be baffled. Chrome shows you code, Safari offers to open an app, Firefox downloads a file.
Compare that with the experience you get from clicking on a social media icon. You’re told exactly what to do and how to do it.
Why can’t we have something like that for RSS? I’m not about to send people to the Wikipedia page.
Over at thriftmac, I’m trying something different. It’s a site about free Mac apps, so I’m linking visitors to a page telling them about free Mac RSS apps, along with basic instructions on how to use them.
I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page website that anyone with RSS could link to. “Welcome to RSS. Here’s why you should use it and how.”
If we want to help wean people off the algorithms, we need to make it easy. Give them a few simple instructions to get them started, and they can take it from there.
More posts in the RSS category
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Tapestry weaves RSS and social media, for better or worse
As if the random chaos in your social media and RSS feeds wasn’t enough on a per-platform basis, now you can get it all mingled together in a one big feed.
A new app called Tapestry combines RSS feeds with Youtube, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and podcasts. Even if you don’t subscribe to much, it can make for a massive list. On the up side, it might give you the wake-up call you need to pare back.
Still, if massive mingling is what you want, Tapestry does it about as well as can be expected, with the designers at The Icon Factory making it a pleasure to use. I like, for example, that the platforms are colour-coded so you can easily pick them out. Bluesky, of course, is blue. And Reddit is, well, red.
The new version of Reeder also combines RSS and social media, though, and I’ll be sticking with that. I like its understated elegance and the options to customize the main feed. For example, I follow Techmeme’s RSS, but keep its firehose separate from what Reeder calls the home feed. I allow just one of the subreddits I follow into the home feed.
Both Tapestry and Reeder work best for lurkers. If you like to use social media to socialize, you need to make an extra tap to go the website in the in-app browser. And at that point you may wonder why you used an app in the first place.
The basics of Tapestry are free, but you may be enticed by a universal filter that comes with the subscription. Sick of U.S. politics? Gone! I’d love to see this feature in Reeder. I’m currently forced to use a web service called siftrss that only works on one feed at a time.
Tapestry is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
More posts in the RSS category
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Shared feeds from Reeder are a neat idea, embeds would make them better
Reeder is a much loved RSS feed reader for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Or at least it was until its latest update.
The new concept was a bit too weird for me — and apparently for a lot of other people as well — so I put off testing it and stuck with what is now known as Reeder Classic. Good old Reeder was good enough for me.
But curiosity about a feature called shared feeds finally got the best of me. So I downloaded the app to my iPad and paid for an annual subscription, which worked out to a little over a dollar a month.
Setting up a shared feed was fairly easy. I created a tag called “latest” and tagged a few items with it. I then went to the “latest” folder, long pressed and had a look at its settings. In the sharing section you can turn on a public JSON feed and give it a name. You get a public URL, which you can share.
Here’s the feed I made. It’s hosted by Reeder’s developer at reederapp.net.
Now, every time I tag an item with “latest,” it shows up in this public feed. I’m not sure what to do with this, but it definitely has a coolness factor.
It would be even cooler, though, if you could embed it on a website. There's no way to do this from within the app, but you can grab a JSON feed with a little JavaScript — if the server allows it. This one — as a security precaution — does not. The workaround is to create a proxy with PHP.
It took a lot of fussing with the help of ChatGPT, but here’s what I managed. I like how it turned out. An embed like this could possibly be used to give readers updates from other websites. I hope the developer eventually allows you to create embeds from the app.
Will I actually use it? I’m still thinking about it.
Update: I've created a Likes section for newsonaut. Check it out to see the articles I like.
Update 2: It was a fun experiment, but I haven't been keeping the Like section up to date, so I'm longer linking to it in the main navigation.
More posts in the RSS category
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Gonna sift those guys right out of my feeds
Four years ago, I wrote about using siftrss to filter out unwanted items from your RSS feeds “in these troubled times.”
The times are just as troubled as ever, so I’m once again recommending siftrss, but this time I have a better idea of how it works.
Say, for example, you wanted to subscribe to Techmeme’s feed, but didn’t want any items with Trump or Musk in the title.
First, go to siftrss and put in the feed URL for Techmeme. That would be: techmeme.com/feed.xml
Change the first dropdown to “exclude”, the second to “title” and the third to “matches regex”. You need to use regex if you want to exclude more than one keyword.
Fill in the blank with /Trump|Musk/i. This tells the filter to exclude any items that have the word “Trump” or “Musk” in the title. The i at the end makes it case insensitive, meaning the filter works regardless of whether the words are upper or lower case.
If you’re familiar with regex, siftrss uses the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions implementation.
Here are some more examples:
Exclude any items with one of these four keywords: /keyword1|keyword2|keyword3|keyword4/i
The pipe symbol means “or”.
Exclude any items with both of these keywords: /keyword1&keyword2/i
The ampersand means “and”.
I find that taking breaks from certain individuals does wonders for my sense of well-being.
Bonus tip: Hacker News
I use a free app called Hack to read Hacker News. It has a massive number of settings, including one that filters items based on keywords. It’s way down at the bottom under Filters & Blocks — don’t miss it!
More posts in the RSS category
Saturday, July 2, 2022
Unread 3 makes it a pleasure to read your RSS feeds
For several years, RSS has been my main source of news. And for several years, Reeder has been my RSS app of choice.
But then I heard about Unread 3 and decided to give it a try. It is slick! I feel disloyal for saying this, but I'm pretty sure I'll never go back to Reeder.
What's so great about Unread? Let me tell you.
Most impressive is the interface. I find myself using it even when I'm not that interested in the latest news. I just love the way everything looks and feels.
The app makes extensive use of swiping left or right. This means the feeds take up all of the viewing area on an iPad. Each article has a nice big heading, a picture and a full-paragraph summary — it's never truncated.
And if you tap to read the full story, you automatically go into reader mode — a presentation of the article without the ads or cruft commonly found on websites.
It really does make reading enjoyable.
There is one drawback, though — no Mac version. I almost always opt for my iPad to read the news, but there is the odd occasion when I want to read it on my Mac.
This means syncing with Reeder for Mac is a bit of a problem, but it can be overcome. I've been using Unread's own cloud service for syncing, but of course this only works with Unread. To get around this, a person could instead opt for one of several third-party services such as Feedly.
I've used Feedly in the past and don't recall any issues with it, so it's something to keep in mind.
One thing that took some getting used to with Unread was long presses. For example, if you want to remove an account or open it in a new window, you need to long press the name of the account.
In a way this is a good thing because it takes advantage an interface action unique to iOS. So I consider myself educated.
There's no real disadvantage to downloading Unread and trying it out. It's mostly free. A subscription gets you widget customization, article actions, caching, custom app icons and premium support.
Article actions include sharing articles via email. I'm not sure why, but I'm able to do this with a long press despite not being a subscriber.
If you do subscribe, it's $20 a year. Reeder, on the other hand, has up front pricing without a subscription ($10 for Mac, $5 for iOS). They ask you to pay again for a major upgrade. In the past, I've happily done this because it's an app I use a lot and I want to support the developer. I may wind up subscribing to Unread for the same reason.
More posts in the RSS category
Monday, November 2, 2020
Filter out offending RSS feeds
There is a free service so important in these troubled times that it deserves its own post.
It's siftrss. Use it to weed out the news you've had your fill of. A couple of examples that come to mind are trump
and covid
.
If anything truly important happens in either of those areas, the news will find its way to you. Meanwhile, enjoy a little less stress in your life.
You can apparently use regular expressions if you want to match more than one term, although I didn't have any luck with it. The developer, Ryan Gitten, says on Reddit:
You can do that with a little regex magic. In your specific case, the regular expression you'd want to match would be /Android|iOS/. If you don't want it to be case-sensitive you'd add an i to the end of the regex (after the slash), but in this case I'd leave it case-sensitive. Otherwise, the "iOS" part would match "Bioshock" or anything else containing those three letters in that order.
More posts in the RSS category
Sunday, November 1, 2020
News-cation ends, trump-cation starts
News-cation is over. Now begins trump-cation, with unfortunate collateral damage.
When I checked my RSS news feeds this morning, I found 5,199 unread stories. I figured I could ignore the folder with the world news feeds, and avoid infecting myself with the latest from the Idiot-in-Chief.
Unfortunately, he has a way of seeping into other feeds as well. Daring Fireball, a blog by John Gruber about Apple and technology, slips in several examples his president's idiotic behaviour, including edge cases that might might not be covered by mainstream outlets.
I hate the idea of deleting this feed, because Gruber has a lot of great insights, but I'm going to have to do it — at least for a few more months.
Another feed that will have to go is The Atlantic. This outlet provides intelligent in-depth analysis of the news, but unfortunately delves into topics such as the pathology of the Orange One. That's a dark place I do not want to know about.
Ideally, I would be able to filter my feeds based on a key word. Feedly offers this service, but wants $12 a month for it.
Update: I found siftrss — a free service you don't even have to sign up for.
More posts in the RSS category
Sunday, February 17, 2019
lire settings
In my review of lire, I griped about some of the settings being hard to find in this RSS feed reader. So here’s a bit of documentation for those who would like to polish their experience with the app.
When you first fire up lire, there are three places where you can find settings:- The filter
- The folder
- A bunch of other stuff
The screenshots below show how I have them set up for unread in the filter, subscriptions in the folders, and font in the other stuff.
Locations of settings:
1. Filter for default to unread.
2. Set for subscriptions in folder:
3. Set for font, theme, etc.
To get at the typography settings, you have to open an article. This is where I found the all-important line-spacing. I made the margins a little wider as well. These settings will apply to all articles.
Location of typography settings:
Set for line-spacing, etc.:
More posts in the RSS category
Saturday, February 16, 2019
lire close to being perfect RSS feed reader for iPhone
RSS feeds are the best way to keep up with the news, and lire is the best way to wrangle them on your iPhone — with just one niggle.
It’s bizarre that anyone uses Facebook or Twitter for their news. Posts and tweets come in at random times chosen by an algorithm that is not explained to us. The sources of news might be reliable, but just as often they might be fake.
With RSS, you get to choose your news sources — everything from a local newspaper to a national TV network to a new site specializing in a topic. If you can’t can find the feed for a site, send them an email. I got a local paper to put one in that way.
There is only one thing bad about RSS feeds. Sometimes you only get a headline or a snippet of the story. If you want to read the whole thing, you have to go the site. All too often, this means having to wade through ads and trackers to get at the precious content.
Some feed readers have a third-party add-on that pulls in the story, but they can be slow and maybe not work at all.
When I found out that lire was a “full-feed” reader, I was intrigued. The description at the App Store promised I would never have to go to a website to read a story unless I wanted to.
The reviews were good, and I liked the fact that the price ($6.99 in Canada) is a one-time payment. There are no subscriptions to worry about, although you can add a “tip” later if you really like the app. I’ll probably give one myself.
After a few weeks of exploring lire, I was able to make it do pretty much anything I could think of. For example: it defaults to unread, the font is Helvetica Neue, the line-spacing is much looser, the background colour is muted, the margins are a little bigger.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it took me a few weeks.
The line-spacing was way too tight for my eyes, and I thought regularly about sending a suggestion the developer about adding a preference for it. Turns out that there are a bunch of typography-related preferences, but you have to go into an individual article to find them.
Even when I found them, I suspected that they would only work for that one article. They would much easier to discover if they were in with all the other preferences.
Which leads me to one last discovery that makes lire close to being perfect.
My feeds are divided into folders named for categories of news — regional, national, world and so forth. The default is to show all the subscriptions in the folder together, but I like the option of being able to read one subscription at a time. You can set a preference for this (again not easy to discover) but it’s a either-or situation. You can’t choose as you go along.
This is not a deal-breaker for me, and likely isn’t one for you either. So if you’re looking for a great RSS feed reader, go ahead and take a chance on lire.
PS: Could we please have a version for macOS?
More posts in the RSS category
