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Ask HN: What's on your RSS reader?
148 points by Guyag on July 30, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 72 comments
I'm interested to hear what you think is good/important enough to warrant following, admittedly with the aim of expanding my list. I'd also be interested to hear what reader you use.

Here's my list (most of these are easily searchable so I won't link them):

Comics: Cube Drone, Dilbert daily, Garfield daily, Invisible Bread, lolnein, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Oatmeal, xkcd

Misc: xkcd what if?, John A De Goes' blog [1], Still Drinking [2], Krebs on Security

I use a Telegram bot [3] as a 'reader' of sorts (no affiliation).

[1] http://degoes.net/

[2] https://www.stilldrinking.org/

[3] https://telegram.me/TheFeedReaderBot




Interestingly (on reflection, not surprisingly) since going back to RSS, I've been reading a lot more from sites with expert content, but ugly typography.

- Math Babe (https://mathbabe.org)

        + Superb musings and coverage on the societal
          impact of everything becoming a prediction
          problem (occasional applied technical 
          discussion)
- Tech Dirt (https://www.techdirt.com/)

        + Lawyers Rule Everything Around Me
- Light Blue Touchpaper (https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org)

        + Thoughts on infosec from Cambridge Computer 
          Laboratory (influential on policy, excellent
          coverage of conferences)
- Muckrock (https://www.muckrock.com/)

        + News from the FOIA wars


Tech Dirt seems to have quite a high volume. Do you use any filtering, or just manually scan over?


You're right --- I just skim the headlines.


- Slate Star Codex (http://slatestarcodex.com/)

     + Really good analysis of complicated and interesting
       issues in science, medicine, politics, rationality,
       ethics, and community dynamics.


I don't actually use RSS for news, because all the regularly updating sites I read fall into four categories:

- News sites like HN or LWN, where I find the RSS experience quite suboptimal compared to participating directly.

- Blogs, which I read entirely via Planet aggregators: Planet Debian, Planet GNOME, Kernel Planet, and Planet Mozilla.

- Comics, serialized stories, and other things where I want to read every page and remember what I haven't read. For these, I use Comic Rocket (https://www.comic-rocket.com/), which a friend and I wrote years ago. Every one of the comics you mentioned is tracked there, along with XKCD's What If.

(That's in addition to mailing lists, which includes announcement lists, and Twitter, which also covers things like This Week In Rust.)


I actually find RSS more valuable for sites that do not update often. You know, that one blog from an incredible guy who posts five times a year, or from a friend of yours who post a project update even now and then.

I also subscribe for sites that update very often, such as Hack a Day, so I can scan the headlines and sort very fast what I want to save for later (GTD style). For this, I use newsblur keyboard shortcuts.


I tend to use Comic Rocket for those rarely-updating sites too; anything with a next link works. For instance, I read http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ that way, and several other things that update even less often (a few times a year).

Every time I try an RSS reader, I find myself drowning in things I don't actually care to read in their entirety. And I prefer to read almost everything on the original site, rather than in a newsreader.


The trouble with your approach (mixing everything into time-sorted feeds) is that you are more likely to see high-volume posters. You're more likely to miss out on low-velocity but high-quality sources. I've written indirectly about this before: http://akkartik.name/post/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc. But that was a long time ago. These days I don't care about relevance or personalization. I just make sure that I diversify my personal reading regardless of what the world around me is putting into its brain: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml. There's almost 250 sources in there, but it generates 2-3 posts a day that I don't ever want to miss.

A recent thread with tons of recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563516.


I stopped using RSS readers after the demise of Google Reader & my shift to Twitter. But I can't live without these sites which take me almost to all the placed on the net :) HackerNews- Daily morning read, can't live without it. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters :) Techmeme - A river of news to read corporate tech news. Kottke - I am not kidding, I read it daily to impress my 8 year old daughter - from Pixar to movies to planet discoveries. Techdirt - Interesting debates on tech policies. Edge.org - If you really have good supply of Coffee & very solid conversations.

Enjoy.


What's LWH ?


LWN: https://lwn.net/ . Best source for FOSS news; next best thing to reading all of the Linux Kernel mailing list and many other first-hand sources, as well as reports from numerous conferences.


One source that I am always delighted to see pop up each week in my Feedly reader is The Codeless Code: http://thecodelesscode.com/contents Each article is a parable or koan that aims to convey some kind of programming best practice. I'm very happy to recommend it.


Here's my pastebin: http://pastebin.com/X6mMEMD1

I removed the "IRL" category of people I know personally.

Lots of these are defunct. "Comics" is the only category I keep up with on a daily basis -- the rest is much more sporadic, just based on what catches my eye when I'm skimming the unread list. I have around 6000 unread items at the moment.

After Google Reader closed down, I switched to Feedly for a few months, then installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared hosting -- never have to worry about the service shutting down or modifying its features without my permission anymore.


Yeah, Tiny Tiny RSS is pretty good. It's reliable, it never chokes on a feed and it has a decent Android app.

I've been using it since before Google Reader shut down, and I'm quite happy with it.


Fiery Feeds[1] is a decent app for iOS that supports tt-rss.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-client-for-feedl...


RSS feeds rock! Just needs a bit of tweaking to lower the noise, which is still very low, and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting, compared to social platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc.

Some interesting feeds we've created using Feedity are listed at https://feedity.com/featured.aspx

shameless plug: Using our tool at https://feedity.com, you can create custom feeds for any webpage (including Twitter and Facebook).


thanks for the shameless plug, I was looking for exactly this the last time I tried making a habit out of reading RSS feeds.


Mozilla Hacks [0] is pretty much the only feed that makes sense recommending here. There's a lot of very detailed explanations for technical problems and their solution in there, which I find pretty interesting.

Otherwise, though, less so a specific feed and more a general idea what to put in there: YouTube channels. There's a few channels which I follow, but I don't particularly fancy visiting youtube.com for it, and neither do I particularly fancy having a Google-account.

But YouTube offers RSS feeds for pretty much every channel, which solves both problems. Also has the added advantage of all the features that your RSS reader offers, particularly being able to filter out any video series that you don't care about has been incredibly useful to me.

If you want to migrate your subscriptions to RSS, there's also a button in YouTube to export all of them to an OPML-file, which you can then import into your RSS reader (if it supports import). Assuming Google hasn't changed the design of YouTube since last time visited, this button should be at the bottom of the "Manage Subscriptions"-page.

As for RSS reader recommendation, on desktop I use QuiteRSS [1], mainly because it's the most feature-rich RSS reader that I've found so far.

On Android, SpaRSS [2] is my preferred reader, with my main-criteria being that it supports at least filtering and OPML-import, is preferably FOSS, and plays nicely with my YouTube-usage (I use it together with NewPipe [3]).

[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/

[1]: https://quiterss.org/

[2]: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.etuldan.spar...

[3]: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.schabi.newpi...


For youtube you could manually add channel or user ID's to the end of these URL strings to get RSS feeds:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=


http://cacm.acm.org/ - Communications of the ACM

https://www.hpcwire.com/ - HPCwire: Global News and Information on High Performance Computing

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ - Lambda the Ultimate

https://openai.com/blog/ - OpenAI Blog

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - Shtetl-Optimized. The Blog of Scott Aaronson

http://feedworld.net/toc/ - Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator

http://deepmind-ai.blogspot.com/ - DeepMind AI

https://www.technologyreview.com - MIT Technology review

And a bit of fun:

http://phdcomics.com/comics.php - PhD comics

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics

https://what-if.xkcd.com/ - What If?


Thanks for this list, the MIT review looks great.

For ACM, I'm a bit confused, for the basic subscription they offer 1 publication (like a magazine) or you have to pick up a topic? They offer dozens of publications.


This feed http://cacm.acm.org/magazine.rss publishes ~25 articles once a month


Which RSS reader do you all use? RSS fell by the wayside for me after Google Reader was shutdown. I thought HN+Reddit+Twitter+Medium would replace it but I still find myself missing updates from several wonderful sites that don't update regularly.


Inoreader has plenty of advanced features. It's better than what Google Reader was like.


+1 to inoreader, I've been using it since the demise of Google Reader. Stable, full-featured, and great mobile apps.

https://www.inoreader.com/


I used to use Digg and switched over recently to Inoreader, way better in almost every way.


This looks great, thanks for the tip!


I like NewsBlur, has a good web client and a nice app for iOS (phone and pad).

Edit: maybe also for Android but I simply don't know.


It is, indeed, also on Android. I use it there constantly, works great. Back in the Google Reader demise days, I tried pretty much everything that was available, and NewsBlur was clearly the best. I've happily paid for it ever since. The founder and his staff are responsive to issues on Twitter, too.

As for what I read:

- Blogs category: 116 "blogs", which is to say irregularly (sometimes very rarely) updated feeds with longer-form content (includes some podcasts).

- Miscellaneous category:

  - Charles Arthur's daily link list

  - Daring Fireball

  - LWN.net

  - Marco Arment

  - Matt Mullenweg

  - Planet Gentoo

  - Planet Mozilla

  - The Codeless Code

  - Trivium
- Comics

  - CommitStrip

  - Dilbert

  - Geek&Poke

  - Not Invented Here

  - Oglaf

  - Power Nap

  - Questionable Content

  - Strong Female Protagonist

  - wulffmorgenthaler

  - xkcd
The full list, if you're interested, is here:

https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/NewsBlur-djc-2016-07-31.xml


I'm completely in love with Feedly. They also replicated Google Readers api, so you can use Feedly as your single-sign on, but use another RSS reader that understands the old Google Reader-api if you prefer to jugle RSS readers around a little.


I'm using Movim (p.s.: I'm the author - https://movim.eu/). I have a little daemon in Python that parses hundreds of RSS/Atom feeds and push them to public XMPP Pubsub nodes, https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub.

After that I just use Movim to subscribe to them and I can enjoy real-time pushed news in a nice UI that is available on my phone, browser on in an app. And everyone can also subscribe and publish on new nodes. I really think that XMPP is a really nice protocol to do such things.


Feedly is OK


Digg Reader. It's simple but functional.


Thunderbird


Gwene's rss-to-nntp converter: gwene.org. Which has been down for the past couple of days, and I'm missing my fix!


newsbeuter.


theoldreader.com is what I use. Closest to Google Reader...


rss2email


I wrote (and maintain) my own rss reader for iOS - https://github.com/younata/RSSClient/, here's a trimmed down version what I follow:

News:

- Electrek - https://electrek.co (Basically Tesla news, but ostensibly EV news)

- Hackaday

- MacRumors

Swift/iOS Dev:

- Natasha The Robot - http://natashatherobot.com

- Swift Weekly Brief - https://swiftweekly.github.io

- This Week in Swift - http://swiftnews.curated.co

- NSHipster

Misc:

- xkcd What If

- Wait but Why

- Mr. Money Mustache

There's also other stuff not really worth mentioning - serialized stories (mostly just feeds for a few reddit user's posts), my blog, some comics, etc.


Can you share what it looks like? The github screenshots link is broken


If you follow the link on the github page to the app store there is screenshots there.


I'm a big fan of Feedly, have been using it since they came out and the constantly keeps improving stuff.

Among the things I subscribe too are about a 100 webcomics.

Decided to share all my RSS links here: http://feedshare.net/theknarf/

A lot of different stuff on that list, but mostly programming, web development and comics.


http://thebrowser.com (subtitle: "Writing worth reading") is one of my favorites.

It is basically one voracious reader (Robert Cottrell) who trawls the internet to select 5-6 pieces worth reading every day. It's a good combo of news, economics, science, and just random, beautiful writing – I really value non-tech-related writing it introduces into my feed/life. (There is a subscription fee to see more 2-3 of today's articles, but it's like $30 a year).

I also recommend subscribing to a filtered feed of HackerNews if you feel like it's taking up too much of your time but you don't want to give it up entirely :). I follow http://hnrss.org/newest?points=100 so I only see articles that get at least 100 points.


I just read Hacker News :).

shameless plug: I also created a weekly newsletter for frontend development - for lazy/busy people like me that don't want to sift through the millions of blogs/articles/aggregators. @frontendweekly1


I use inoreader + reeder. Reeder integrates with Pocket so I can read offline.

I follow:

- Newsites: HN, Dzone, Voxxed, ARS Technica, Highscalability...

- Webcomics (Xkcd, Commitstrip, Dilbert...)

- Youtube channels: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel...

- Most of these: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs


Some tech blogs:

Benedict Evans: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/

Hunter Walk: https://hunterwalk.com/

Coding Horrow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/

Feld Thoughts: http://www.feld.com/

Mattermark: https://mattermark.com/

BEN THOMPSON: https://stratechery.com/

The Angel VC: http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/


I use netvibes. Basically replaced my old "my yahoo" page about five years back. Love it.


I cut 80-90% of my feeds in the last years and prefer digests now because they provide more information for less time spent reading.

http://ios-goodies.tumblr.com/rss - iOS digest

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SidebarFeed - design digest

http://feeds.newscientist.com/health - some science news

http://feeds.newscientist.com/life - more science news


I am using BazQux Reader (https://bazqux.com/). The name is awful and it is also paid, but it is very fast, stable and very similar to Google Reader.

Bonus point: it is written in Haskell


I also use BazQux and bought their lifetime subscription. Their site is written in Ur/Web[0] though, not Haskell.

0: http://www.impredicative.com/ur/


- anime/subs related stuff

- webcomics (xkcd, alberto montt)

- music (boards of canada wiki, music for programming.net)

- java stuff (adam bien, onjava.com, planet clojure, grails.io, the server side, the cognicast)

- job boards (wfh.io, functional jobs, stack overflow careers, clojurework.com)

- coding stuff (atomic spin, adam bard, ycombinator, /r/clojure, the changelog, infoq)

- mixed bag (ars technica, some reddits, waxy.org, thisiscolosal.com, etc.)


I read the New York Times in mine via a phantomjs script that pulls out the text courtesy of DOM selector 'p.story-body-text.'

It's not perfect but I cannot find a closer approximation to the Kindle newsstand experience on a computer screen.

I am an All Digital Access subscriber of the Times and consider my actions justified under the Terms of Service, for whatever that is worth.

I use the Newsbeuter RSS reader.


I use Feed Wrangler (https://feedwrangler.net) as my RSS-service of choice. I use Reeder on my Mac and on iOS (http://reederapp.com) to get at those feeds.


I'm using Newsblur (http://newsblur.com YC S12), mostly through its Android application which works great offline in the subway.


About 200 different feeds, so knowing what you're looking for would be good.

I use Brief on FireFox with Live Bookmarks. Let's me control frequency of downloads, navigate using keyboard, etc.


Whoa, is Brief still being developed? I gave up on it a long ago; it was a decent service.


Just paste it on pastebin!


Or rather share your feeds on http://feedshare.net !


newsbeuter is nice and I use it myself http://newsbeuter.org/screenshots.html


i wrote own reader :) https://github.com/truerss/truerss


Ditto: http://www.weegeeks.com

Does me. YMMV. :)


Here is the pastebin of what I follow

http://pastebin.com/hc6yby4h

It is.... ummmm.....well rounded?


The RSS reader I use is the one I (re)designed called RSSPBRRY. It's available on Github. Link is in my profile, for anyone who wants a peek.


I use Slack, which has RSS-support. I have a channel, which is just for RSS feeds and some other occasional alerts. Works out pretty nicely.


Simple hacked together feed reader/static site: http://akurls.com


Are Technica, Mac Rumors, Macworld, MacStories,

MIT News, MIT Technology Review,

What If? (by Randall Munroe), Symmetry Magazine, Bret Victor’s "Worry Dream"


Made my own. http://asl.am


I use Feedly with Reeder for Mac as the RSS client.


Thunderbird works great to me.

Ubuntu Insights.


feedly because it's free but read thru reeder


Alternate between feed2imap and rss2email.


http://feedly.com/smcleod/blogs

That's a link to the various sites, blogs, updates that I subscribe to, Phronix and Ars are both a bit noisey but other than them the rest I take good care to keep up with.

I personally think it's fantastic that RSS has made such a come back (some would say it never actually went away), it' such a simple, useful tool that's easy to integrate with just about anything.

----

Another interesting discussion I enjoy having is finding out how people read / digest / discover feeds:

tldr; I use Feedly to manage my rss subscriptions and keep all my devices in sync, but instead of using the Feedly's own client, I use an app called Reeder as the client / reader itself.

I can see myself dropping back to a single app / service, which would likely be Feedly but for me Reeder is just a lot cleaner and faster, having said that I could be a bit stuck in my comfort zone with it so I'm open to change if it ever causes me an issue (which it hasn't).

----

I use a combo of two tools:

Feedly - https://feedly.com

RSS feed subscription management.

Features:

- Keyword alerts

- Browser plugins to subscribe to (current) url

- Notation and highlighting support (a bit like Evernote)

- Search and filtering across large numbers of feeds / content

- IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer and Hootsuite integration

- Built in save / share functionality (that I only use when I'm on the website)

- Backup feeds to Dropbox

- Very fast, regardless of the fact that I'm in Australia - which often impacts the performance of apps / sites that tend to be hosted on AWS in the US as the latency is so high.

- Article de-duplication is currently being developed I believe, so I'm looking forward to that!

- Easy manual import, export and backup (no vendor lock-in is important to me)

- Public sharing of your Feedly feeds (we're getting very meta here!)

2. Reeder - http://reederapp.com

A (really) beautiful and fast iOS / macOS client.

- The client apps aren't cheap but damn they're good quality, I much prefer them over the standard Feedly apps

- Obviously supports Feedly as a backend but there are many other source services you can use along side each other

- I save articles using Reeder's clip to Evernote functionality... a lot

- Sensible default keyboard shortcuts (or at least for me they felt natural YMMV of course)

- Good customisable 'share with' options

- Looks pleasant to me

- Easy manual import an export just like Feedly

----

- Now can someone come up with a good bookmarking addon / workflow for me? :)




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