Into the RSS-verse

On The Tenth Day Of Quick Drops 🎅🏽hrbrmstr🎅🏽 Gave To Me…

🎶 Really Simple Syndication 🎶

(If this is your first Xmas Quick Drop, head back to Day 01 to find out what’s going on.)

RSS feeds have survived many “death of…” predictions since Google Reader closed up shop. They’re how I keep current on most everything, and now even power the deep and wide podcast ecosystem.

Today’s drop is a compendium of RSS bits and services I’ve found useful, including a new (to me) one that bridges the RSS-verse and ActivityPub-verse. This means the resources presented are heavily curated, and this drop is not meant as an exhaustive retrospective on the entire RSS universe. Please feel encouraged to drop your fav RSS tools/service in the comments to help others!

NOTE: There are no referral links to any of the mentioned freemium resources and there is no “kickback” from any link. Most apps/services don’t even know I exist/use their kit! I just drop them b/c I find them useful.

Reading

• tuifeed: When at the CLI, this is what I use for the most critical feeds I need access to, no matter where I am.

• Inoreader: My main RSS app/service. You can follow RSS feeds, podcasts (which are just RSS feeds), Twitter searches, FB (ugh) pages, and even email newsletters. Plus, you can use rules to set up entire workflows (e.g., sending push notifications and emails or marking as read when certain criteria are met). It supports active searches to create a search query and all posts mentioning that query will be delivered as a news feed. You can filter out or permit only such articles that match specific criteria from your feeds. And, you can send custom newsletters from it. (Some features are on the paid side of freemium).

• Reeder (macOS/iOS): local app supporting Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, FeedHQ, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, Inoreader, BazQux Reader, FreshRSS, Instapaper and Pocket. I like native apps, and this one also has support for bionic reading.

• Matcha: I’m experimenting with this one as it’s RSS + weather + other dashboard-y things.

Creating

• Huginn: (link goes to previous drop with that info)

• Roll your own! If Huginn — despite having storage, queuing, eventing, parsing, and feed creation capabilities all-in-one — doesn’t meet your needs, one technique I use for monitoring web site changes and getting them into Inoreader is running ssdeep (use any CTPH you like) on a target, calculating the distance, and adding an entry for the diff. It’s a fun project to take on to see how all these pieces work together.

Federating

• RSS To ActivityPub: Roll your own gateway from old-school RSS to the Fediverse!

• WordPress to ActivityPub: For those (like me) on WP but want to Federate your updates.

• Hugo to ActivityPub the hard way.

Discovery

• Feedle: I usually use Inoreader to discover new feeds, but Feedle soared in popularity after the baby boy billionaire started throwing Twitter tantrums. You can enter a keyword (or two) and then follow the resulting search. It’s also a fun way to explore topics without subscribing. Add your site’s RSS to help broaden the corpus.

• RSS Micro: (that link shows search results for “Rust”) Feedle is great, but RSS Micro uses a locally developed algorithm to rank results.

FIN

While leaning into a more commercial framing, this free-to-play Advent of CSS is a nice gateway into Figma and real UX/UI design. My Design teammates at work have some m@d Figma/CSS $k1llz and this has helped me get more comfortable in Figma’s infinite canvas. I may give in and drop $40 USD on the solutions + JS, but you can play 100% for free.