With Twitter in the process of joining the orcas, and with myself just generally growing very tired of modern internet, I've decided to become an RSS guy. I want everything to have an RSS feed, and I want my little curated lists filled with my little points of interests, where I can watch new posts arrive like mail to an inbox that I never have to check manually.
So I've installed a reader for Firefox called Drop Feeds. It lives in the browser's sidebar, so it doesn't rely on a webservice like Feedly to function, and I can open or close it at my leisure. Any feeds that I subscribe to are literally stored in the browser's bookmarks folder - easy to organize, and I can sync these bookmarks to whatever, so they're fairly easy to keep backed up.
Drop Feeds unfortunately doesn't seem to handle .JSON feeds, just .RSS and .ATOM feeds, so I will probably keep looking around for another reader. But what I do really appreciate about Drop Feeds is that it supports custom themes and templates - to the point that it lets you export its built-in themes and templates, and they're just XML and CSS contained in a .ZIP file. So as long as I'm willing to dig around, I can make them look as nice and functional as I want!! (note: as you can probably tell in the screenshot, I haven't had time to do the "look nice" part yet)
Having used a reader for a couple days, I've already learned a couple handy details:
- Our very own Cohost generates RSS feeds, available via:
cohost.org/USER/rss/public.atomorpublic.json
Or you can navigate directly to a user's profile and subscribe, and your reader should be redirected to the RSS feed. - Reddit also generates RSS feeds for each subreddit, available via:
reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT.rss
My experience with Cohost's ATOM feeds have been janky at best. It doesn't show the complete content of a Share, only the original post - and sometimes the same post will just appear multiple times in the feed. I also haven't been able to see any images or videos attached to posts. HTML/CSS crimes are an obvious no-go and I don't expect any reader to support them, but some sort of auto-generated notice to the tune of "This page has HTML/CSS formatting" would be nice.
I'd be curious to see how well Cohost's JSON feeds work, or if another reader can display images or videos, but for the moment, I basically just see Cohost's RSS updates as a notification to check someone's page.
Also, Cohost only does per-user RSS feeds, no Home RSS feed as of yet - largely due to the need for authentication, because otherwise this would be a huge and obvious privacy issue. I'd still pay for one as a Plus! feature though, ngl. I'd be happy to have a Home RSS feed with the condition that the link is meant to be private and should not be freely handed out, unless I understand and accept the risks of doing so.
On the other hand, Reddit RSS feeds have been much more robust. Posts come with images and videos when available, no fuss. I've generally only visited specific subreddits directly and have never subscribed to any, so I don't know any other experience. It's simple, everything works, my only complaint is a Drop Feeds template issue that I can probably fix myself.
Anyway even with little jank issues IRT Cohost, I don't know why I didn't try RSS sooner! It's nice!! I like this experience of just letting new posts arrive in my inbox when they're available, and the absolute basic barebones appearance of new posts in my feed. I want to try and use RSS to keep up with other people on sites that I don't use nearly as often, and give myself half a chance of detaching from the thought of having to refresh websites or scroll forever just to stay up to date with everyone.
I also need to add an RSS feed to my own personal site sometime!!
