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> I have no interest in reading my feeds through > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading > my email that way, like an animal). I haven'

by veidr 13y ago

> I have no interest in reading my feeds through > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading > my email that way, like an *animal*). I haven't laughed that hard at something I read in a blog post so far this year. And I agree wholeheartedly. Who gives a shit about Google Reader the website? (Apparently, a whole lot of people... but not me.) I only care about the syncing. Like Zawinski, I want a fast, awesome, native RSS reader on all my platforms that stays in sync across them. That's it. I would love to get that for free, but aftern thinking on it a moment, I don't see why anybody would provide that to me for free. Thinking on it a moment more, I realized I would pay some reasonable fee for it. However, non-free means 99% of people won't use it, and this in turn means that there is much less incentive for the makers of said fast, awesome, native newsreaders to support such a service in their app. Except that an RSS newsreader that cannot sync is kind of like a dog turd in a bowtie. An enterprising newsreader maker could bite the bullet and make sync a feature of their app -- but I don't think any of the good newsreader apps cover all the important platforms (for me, Mac, iOS, and Android, but for others Windows and Linux are probably in the mix, too). So I don't know what the solution is.

unimpressive 13y ago
>So I don't know what the solution is. Personal cloud. You have a domain name and you host the sync on cheap hardware in your home. For a single application this seems wildly expensive, but if you had a decent ecosystem of apps it'd suddenly be a bargain. This also has secondary benefits like not sending your data to shady 3rd parties.
- amirmc 13y ago
  I agree, but I like the idea of having someone else worry about swapping HDDs etc. So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    >So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails. The implied parenthetical there is "(Without your permission)", encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we're at now in terms of security.
    - amirmc 13y ago
      I don't understand what you mean by "without your permission". I'd expect to have all the keys so it would be 'secure' in that sense. The problem I want to solve is having proper ownership of my stuff without having to do that much more admin. I'd use the cloud as just storage. We're not necessarily that far ahead from having this now as services like tarsnap [1] offer part of what I'm after. I think the missing piece is that no-one's strung the, together into a overall product-offering. [1] http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com
      - unimpressive 13y ago
        I mean exactly what I said, nobody is going to send your data to 3rd parties besides you. (Who themselves can and will send it to other 3rd parties.) I've heard nice things about Tarsnap, but uh: >At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface. This basically means it's for a couple percentage points of the population at best. Ideally I'd like to see more personal cloud users than that. As far as the keys/encryption thing, I was saying it was a good idea. For the vast majority of people, encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we are now.
- guruz 13y ago
  ownCloud has a news app now. https://github.com/owncloud/news https://github.com/owncloud/news I haven't tried it out yet. See also https://github.com/owncloud/News-Qt-App https://github.com/owncloud/News-Qt-App and https://github.com/owncloud/News-Android-App https://github.com/owncloud/News-Android-App
anon1385 13y ago
A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning. The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API. Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1] [1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/ http://adactio.com/journal/6291/
- veidr 13y ago
  Yep, you are exactly right, that is the only proper solution. Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005. I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader... (But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?
  - veidr 13y ago
    I actually hacked up a feed-horfer that populated an IMAP account some years ago. IMAP gets you like 90% of the way there. There's no facility for updating items, that was about the only thing really wrong with it from the end user perspective, assuming you are okay with storing the full text of tens of thousands of items when you will only read 2% of them. But I don't see anything wrong with that in an era where even our phones have 64GB of storage... EDIT (my touch device over zealously submitted): but IMAP isn't the right solution, even though it could work, and work better than google reader even. A RSS sync system really shouldn't require the user to download all the items and then sync against their own copies of them---it should be able to sync what has been read[1] based on the canonical URI of the item, with some intelligence to grok the mod dates to track updated items. Storage isn't a problem anymore for mostly-textual content, but mobile latency and data caps are. [1]: and, in my opinion, notnjust what has been read, but what has been flagged, labeled, tagged, reposted, liked, hated, and／おr assigned whatever other arbitrary metadata
jvdh 13y ago
Checkout rss2imap[0], it grabs RSS data and feeds it directly into IMAP folders so that you can use any mail client to read. Syncing and many different clients are available automagically. It supports OPML import, although not for folders. [0]: https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap
Concours 13y ago
I am the founder of http://www.feedsapi.org http://www.feedsapi.org and this might be an option for what you are trying to achieve. It is not a typical rss reader but more a full text RSS to email service, this feature should allow you to read and organize your RSS news from any email client and any device, it syncs with all platforms as well. Like you already said, such a service can't be free but the pricing is fair and comes with a free trial...feedback welcome, please let me know if it fits yous needs
- veidr 13y ago
  That's actually very interesting! But, far too expensive for me. I would have to pay $348 per year to read the same stuff I read now for free with NetNewsWire + Google Reader. Even though I don't actually read 15,000 articles a month, I definitely download that many to browse through. Personally, I would pay maybe a tenth of that.
  - Concours 13y ago
    Well unfortunately, such a price structure wouldn't be sustainable for us

> I have no interest in reading my feeds through > a web site (no more than I would tolerate reading > my email that way, like an *animal*). I haven'

by veidr 13y ago

unimpressive 13y ago

>So I don't know what the solution is. Personal cloud. You have a domain name and you host the sync on cheap hardware in your home. For a single application this seems wildly expensive, but if you had a decent ecosystem of apps it'd suddenly be a bargain. This also has secondary benefits like not sending your data to shady 3rd parties.

amirmc 13y ago
I agree, but I like the idea of having someone else worry about swapping HDDs etc. So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >So I'd want the same thing mirrored (but encrypted) up in the public cloud. I don't want to end up in a situation where all my stuff dies because a disk fails. The implied parenthetical there is "(Without your permission)", encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we're at now in terms of security.
  - amirmc 13y ago
    I don't understand what you mean by "without your permission". I'd expect to have all the keys so it would be 'secure' in that sense. The problem I want to solve is having proper ownership of my stuff without having to do that much more admin. I'd use the cloud as just storage. We're not necessarily that far ahead from having this now as services like tarsnap [1] offer part of what I'm after. I think the missing piece is that no-one's strung the, together into a overall product-offering. [1] http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com
    - unimpressive 13y ago
      I mean exactly what I said, nobody is going to send your data to 3rd parties besides you. (Who themselves can and will send it to other 3rd parties.) I've heard nice things about Tarsnap, but uh: >At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface. This basically means it's for a couple percentage points of the population at best. Ideally I'd like to see more personal cloud users than that. As far as the keys/encryption thing, I was saying it was a good idea. For the vast majority of people, encrypted backups would be miles ahead of where we are now.
guruz 13y ago
ownCloud has a news app now. https://github.com/owncloud/news https://github.com/owncloud/news I haven't tried it out yet. See also https://github.com/owncloud/News-Qt-App https://github.com/owncloud/News-Qt-App and https://github.com/owncloud/News-Android-App https://github.com/owncloud/News-Android-App

anon1385 13y ago

A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning. The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API. Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1] [1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/ http://adactio.com/journal/6291/

veidr 13y ago
Yep, you are exactly right, that is the only proper solution. Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005. I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader... (But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)
zeckalpha 13y ago
What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?
- veidr 13y ago
  I actually hacked up a feed-horfer that populated an IMAP account some years ago. IMAP gets you like 90% of the way there. There's no facility for updating items, that was about the only thing really wrong with it from the end user perspective, assuming you are okay with storing the full text of tens of thousands of items when you will only read 2% of them. But I don't see anything wrong with that in an era where even our phones have 64GB of storage... EDIT (my touch device over zealously submitted): but IMAP isn't the right solution, even though it could work, and work better than google reader even. A RSS sync system really shouldn't require the user to download all the items and then sync against their own copies of them---it should be able to sync what has been read[1] based on the canonical URI of the item, with some intelligence to grok the mod dates to track updated items. Storage isn't a problem anymore for mostly-textual content, but mobile latency and data caps are. [1]: and, in my opinion, notnjust what has been read, but what has been flagged, labeled, tagged, reposted, liked, hated, and／おr assigned whatever other arbitrary metadata

jvdh 13y ago

Checkout rss2imap[0], it grabs RSS data and feeds it directly into IMAP folders so that you can use any mail client to read. Syncing and many different clients are available automagically. It supports OPML import, although not for folders. [0]: https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap

Concours 13y ago

I am the founder of http://www.feedsapi.org http://www.feedsapi.org and this might be an option for what you are trying to achieve. It is not a typical rss reader but more a full text RSS to email service, this feature should allow you to read and organize your RSS news from any email client and any device, it syncs with all platforms as well. Like you already said, such a service can't be free but the pricing is fair and comes with a free trial...feedback welcome, please let me know if it fits yous needs

veidr 13y ago
That's actually very interesting! But, far too expensive for me. I would have to pay $348 per year to read the same stuff I read now for free with NetNewsWire + Google Reader. Even though I don't actually read 15,000 articles a month, I definitely download that many to browse through. Personally, I would pay maybe a tenth of that.
- Concours 13y ago
  Well unfortunately, such a price structure wouldn't be sustainable for us