Update: RSS Feed Readers
Green and Blue Nighttime Landscape.
A couple of RSS based projects have been brought to my attention since I published The State of RSS Feed Readers a little over a week ago. So here's a brief update.
Kagi News
Several people mentioned Kagi News in comments on Mastodon to the original article. Kagi News was really not what I had in mind when writing the original article. It is more of a curated news service along the lines of Google News or Ground News rather than a reader that you can add the feeds you want to track. However, it bears some more resemblance to Techmeme or Memeorandum than Google News in a sense.
Kagi News uses hundreds, possibly thousands, of RSS feeds to aggregate news stories. These stories are then fed into an AI system that reads them, and writes a summary of all the articles it has consumed. The summary is heavily cross-referenced against the original sources, and all the sources used in writing the summary are listed at the bottom of the article.
While AI is a very controversial topic these days this is one of the few times when I believe it is used properly. There is little chance that anyone could read all 50+ versions a story published by all the newspapers and magazines in the world. Having a summary that pulls all of them together, and tries to present a story with facts that align with the majority of the available reporting is interesting.
It's also useful that they provide an RSS feeds for each topic, so you can pull their feeds into your personal choice of RSS reader.
Miniflux
I didn't mention Miniflux as an option in the self-hosted portion of the original article, despite its popularity. The reason? Quite simply: I forgot it. :) Miniflux was one of the options I had looked at, and has a major selling point in its favor.
Miniflux is an extremely lightweight RSS feed reader with a minimal interface that is fast and responsive. The whole application is minimal, even a full Docker image is under 20meg in size. The only downside I see is the requirement to set up an external database to use it.
If you don't want to self-host Miniflux, there is a hosted version for $15/yr.
Feedgrab
This is the reason I decided to write this update. I don't think I saw Feedgrab referenced anywhere, and it's a shame. Feedgrab is a beautiful, minimal hosted RSS reader from the creator of Pagecord. And while it's a hosted application it is completely free.
While Miniflux may have a some more features than Feedgrab, it makes up for them with one feature: starting feeds. When you create an account you are presented with a menu of categories, in each category is 30-50 feeds for you to chose from. This makes it quick and easy to populate your feed with stories that will be of interest to you.
And, there is a little extra: there is a browser extension for adding the feeds of sites to Feedgrab. Just install the Feedgrab extension, and whenever you find a site you want to follow, just add it to Feedgrab. And, of course, you can import your own OPML file if you have one, or export your feeds to an OPML file.
It's a very simple system. No special features or options for you to set. You can star items, mark them read / unread. That's it. No categorization of feeds. No ranking feeds, or tagging items, etc. It's all about reading the feeds that you have selected.
Conclusion
This was just a short update, a few items that I had missed the first time around, which seemed relevant to add to the discussion of RSS feed readers.
One last thought: I was impressed with Kagi News. Enough that I added their feeds to Calibre to scan daily, as a “quick news” newspaper / magazine I can scan each morning. It's quite a nice to have a publication that I can look at quickly, have an idea of what's going on, and if something really catches my attention, I can dig in deeper by looking at the original sources.
In testing the Feedgrab extension didn't work as expected in Waterfox. But, that could be some incompatibility with Waterfox. Or it could be that the extension hasn't been updated for some time. At this point there were only four downloads of the extension, so I have doubts that it's getting extensively tested.
Categories: #Features Tags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #update License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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