Monday, January 6, 2025 →

RSS Newsletters and Reading-It-Later

For reading and following content online I’ve been a big user of RSS for about 15 years and have refined a solid OPML file that has carried over from app to app. This is one of the great things about a simple and well supported open standard. I can pick up and move whenever I want. Or whenever an application I’m using no longer fits my needs (or shuts down).

After Google killed off Google Reader I moved to Feedly for a while. Feedly is great but it got a little cluttered and started to push other, “related” content on me which I don’t really like. I’ve found with online sources the best way to discover new content is to look at recommendations from people I already follow and whose opinion I trust. Not an algorithm. Blogrolls are a great way to find new sources to follow.

I bounced around to a lot of different apps that were mainly mobile (Android for me) only. None of the ones I used ever really hooked me into staying and with the ease of exporting an OPML file it was easy to bounce around. Eventually I settled on an open source app called Feeder. It’s a great application and you can get it from the Play Store, F-Droid or their Github. With the rise of newsletters in popularity and starting to subscribe to those, I found that I wanted to get those out of my email apps and into a better reading experience. Unfortunately Feeder had no way to support that.

After some searching around I found Omnivore. It was open source, free, cross-platform and provided every account with an email you could use to send content to. So I was able to set up a forwarding rule in my mail account to forward newsletters to Omnivore and they would show up in my list of articles with a newsletter tag.

In November of 2024 Omnivore shut down. It is possible to use the open sourced code to run your own server but their containerization was still a work in progress and I wasn’t able to get it running on my homelab server after a few nights of trying.

So I was back on the hunt for something that could handle RSS and newsletters. I tried 3 different services. Inoreader, Newsblur and Readwise Reader. On the bright side, each of these services are cross-platform and have a lot more features and nice-to-haves than simple RSS readers. On the negative side, they are all paid services.

Inoreader’s UI/UX was never really comfortable for me so I dropped that after the free trial period.

Newsblur has a really good flow for just RSS and consuming articles that way. The big problem I had with it is the “Saved Stories” functionality. As I check feed updates throughout the day some of the articles I just need to read the headline, some are short and I can get through them in a few minutes and others need to be saved for later due to length. It’s a much better experience to send these longer stories to a “read it later” service like Pocket or Instapaper. But then I need another service and another subscription.

Readwise Reader has the concept of a Feed and the concept of a Library. The feed is standar RSS type feed style and the library is like a read it later service. While I’m processing my feed articles it is easy to send the longer ones to the library. As you read articles they track reading location down to the paragraph which is great across devices. They have built in text to voice which is nice for listening to articles while doing other activities. They also have great highlighting and notes functionality. Which makes sense given the fact that Readwise is all about saving your highlights. They work largely like the Bookmarks functionality of micro.blog. All of you highlights for articles are also imported into Readwise so you can review and process them using Readwise tool set. One great feature of the mobile application is it’s support for e-ink devices. It allows me to read on my Boox device with ease.

After the 30 day free trial of Readwise Reader I decided to pay for a year and see how I it goes. If I find I’m not using it or switch to another service, I’ll cancel. They have the ability to create public links to highlights and notes for an article so I’d like to see what that would look like used here on micro.blog. I doubt anything will come close to being as convenient as the built in Bookmarks of micro.blog. There might be an opportunity for a micro.blog plugin that takes that link and converts the highlights and notes into the beginnings of a post.

So anyway, that’s a summary of my journey to find an RSS reader.