How I use RSS 🔗

RSS readers are pretty neat. They allow you to conveniently read all of your content in one place, no need to go to a dozen different websites just to read the latest blog posts or news articles. I love efficiency, and to me this is the perfect way to be efficient with how I ingest online content. It also doubles as a filter for all of the noise the internet has to offer. A few years ago I decided stop actively using Reddit. This was in no small part due to the predatory way Reddit forced Apollo to shut down, and so my favorite way to access the site was no longer possible to use. This was a blessing in disguise, as it led me to seek ways to keep up to date with some of the subreddits I enjoyed browsing without actually using the site at all. I learned that you can turn subreddits into RSS feeds, and so a handful of ones I wanted to keep up to date with now live as feeds in my RSS reader, filtered by “Top of Month” so I get to skip all of the noise and only read the posts that seem interesting.

Now there are a few popular RSS readers available online, such as Feedly, but as a tech enthusiast I run my own self-hosted instance of FreshRSS. This is not necessarily better than an off-the-shelf product like Feedly, but it is Open Source which is attractive to me as a software engineer. I like tinkering with things and the process of setting it up was enjoyable enough to justify the added complexity of self-hosting it myself.

An Intersection of Niche Interests 🔗

As a software engineer, I spend a lot of time in a terminal using command-line tools like git, vim, and various other tools useful to developers. Over the years I have become a little bit obsessed with doing as much as I possible can in the terminal. You may see where this is going.

Enter the first tool I found called nom. This is a neat little tool that supports using FreshRSS as a backend to display your feeds in the terminal. It has a nice interface and supports vim-style keybinds by default. It does have one issue however: it only supports storing you API password to freshRSS in plaintext in the nom config file. This is unfortunately a deal breaker for me as a security concious individual, but I do have plans on submitting a PR to fix this (look out for an exploration of Keyrings, Password Managers, and that particular PR in a future post).

In the meantime I will move on to the other command-line RSS reader I found: newsboat. From what I have read online, this is a much more mature RSS reader and is typically what people recommend. It has a lots of customization options, looks decent, and most importantly supports running external commands to retrieve my FreshRSS password. One feature that I’ve come to really like about newsboat is the ability to create “queryfeeds”, artificial feeds that combine multiple real feeds and have a custom filter applied to them. One simple queryfeed I have made is one that only shows posts from the past 24 hours. This is an easy way for me to catch up in the mornings on anything new. Other times I just want to view posts by one particular blogger, so I can enter that feed and browse at my leisure.

Of course, I also have other ways to access my RSS feeds, like an app on my phone, or in the browser directly in my FreshRSS instance, but somehow it feels cooler to be reading in the terminal. If I want a quick 5 minute break from what I’m doing, I’ll pop over to another tmux window in my terminal and read a short article.

Closing Thoughts 🔗

This post might be a bit ramble-y, but I wanted my first post on this blog to be about something I am interested in. cli RSS readers just so happened to be what was on my mind when I decided to write this, so I brain-dumped what you just read. I have actually been contemplating on what to write about for over a month at this point, and decided that I just needed to sit down and actually write something. I am intentionally not going to edit this post much, because I want to get my first post over with. I intend for my future posts to be a bit more focused and technical, like the PR to nom I mentioned earlier on in this post, but the occasional brain-dump of something I’m thinking about or interested in may show up every now and then.