Aman Bhargava Bangalore India Data Visualization Designer & Developer aman@diagramchasing.fun
Aman Bhargava Bangalore India Data Visualization Designer & Developer aman@diagramchasing.fun

I love my new RSS feed

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I set up FreshRSS on my server a few days ago and I have been loving the experience. Subscribing to RSS and having an RSS reader always felt like one of those things which I said with a vague sense of hand-waving approval (like reading ‘the classics’. Oh yes, Little Women, solid book gestures approval) but it is only with FreshRSS that I have completely been sold on this.

I know it is very late and true indieweb puritans are rolling their eyes at my ignorance but I am today’s ten thousand.

Here’s what I like about it so far:

  1. The UI is DEAD SIMPLE and snappy enough that I don’t need an app to read on my phone. It just works.
  2. Adding new feeds (blog sources) is incredibly easy and I can curate how my main feed should look, what it should and shouldn’t include, and groups make it very easy to keep track of new posts. There is no clutter, no maze of options which I MUST navigate just so I can read.
  3. It is highly configurable but the rabbit hole is completely opt-in. I didn’t have to read any documentation after installation and just added 8-10 blogs right off the bat quickly and began reading. Amazing??
  4. The reader UI is very good. I can add custom share buttons, move between articles very quickly.
  5. The API is solid. I haven’t explore all of it but I used some basic endpoints to create the dynamic blog roll page you see here. I’ve always wanted to have this section on my site and now I can centrally manage my feed and subscriptions without having to worry about syncing things between my site and my feed.

RSS has begun to be mentioned more and more in my life for some reason. At IndiaFOSS I met Adithya and Nikhil, who run a webring of blogs in their college (amrita.town) and asked me if Diagram Chasing has an RSS feed they can subscribe to. So did Adithya Athalye, who was helping at the Open-Data devroom and emailed me afterwards asking for an RSS feed. When three-four people within a span of 2 weeks mention RSS feeds expecting you to have one, you do your due diligence and try to finally see what the deal is about. And I am glad that I did. I find myself spending more time looking through this new feed that I have curated than Twitter or Instagram. Like god intended.

I will try to get more friends to write blogs so I can subscribe to them and keep track of what they publish. FreshRSS allows multiple accounts so at the least I will try to have some interested friends and family have an account on it to spread the good word.

SO. MUCH. FUN. BACK TO READING, AND NOT SCROLLING, THE WEB.

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