2018-12-26 RSS and Firefox

You might have heard that Mozilla is removing RSS features from Firefox. Booo!

RSS is what keeps the news out of the hands of our corporate overlords. RSS allows you to follow the blogs you want to follow without submitting to the tools of surveillance capitalism. So, what do you do if you don’t want the algorithms of Facebook and friends to determine the news you see? You get into the feed business.

Part one: *finding the feeds on the websites that don’t advertise them*. But where will you discover those?

Solution one: *a bookmarklet to show the hidden feeds*. Feeds are advertised in a machine readable format, kept away from readers. The bookmarklet is a bookmark that runs a piece of Javascript instead of visiting a new site. The Javascript examines the page you’re currently looking at and creates a little overlay that links to all the feeds. See Show All Feeds for a copy. This is the solution @PresGas liked.

Show All Feeds

@PresGas

Solution two: *a browser extension to put the button back into the toolbar* is Awesome RSS. This is the solution @jeroenpraat and @stewedchicken recommended.

Awesome RSS

@jeroenpraat

@stewedchicken

Part two: *reading the feeds in your browser*. If you want previews of feed links, then you’re going to be out of luck.

Solution one: *a browser extension to provide feed previews* is RSS Preview. This is the solution @hairylarry recommended.

RSS Preview

@hairylarry

Solution two: *a browser extension to read feeds* is Livemarks. This is the solution @brennen recommended. It provides RSS feed bookmark folders that are auto-updated regularly.

Livemarks

@brennen

If you want a complete feed reader application in your browser, @rmdes recommended Feedbro. (What a terrible name, though!)

@rmdes

Feedbro

Part three: *a user interface to collect them all*. If you’re serious about reading lots of blogs and lots of news, then you’ll need a feed reader. I’ve used Feedly in the past. Recently, I’ve seen people recommend Inoreader. There are also stand alone applications to use. I’ve used Reeder in the past, but these days I use newsboat, if at all.

Feedly

Inoreader

Reeder

newsboat

Anyway. Blogs are not dead, yet!

​#Blogs ​#RSS ​#Firefox

Comments

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If you are using an NNTP-reader (such as Gnus, you can also consume feeds (RSS/Atom) using gwene.org or (shameless self-promotion) my improved knock off feedbase.org.

Gnus

gwene.org

feedbase.org

– Adam 2018-12-26 16:31 UTC

Adam

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Hah, it sounds very interesting! 😄

– Alex Schroeder 2018-12-26 17:51 UTC