The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Switching to FreshRSS

QuiteRSS is a terrific piece of software. It only has one flaw, which is that it only runs on my desktop. Unfortunately this has led to me increasingly getting behind on the things I like to read. Sometimes this is fine, like when I can read a book instead, but other times it’s mildly frustrating.

QuiteRSS in three-column mode.

It would seem that none of the online feeds readers, whether self-hosted or SaaS, support the paradigm I’m used to. They’re all following the “golden standard” of nightmarish, thankfully-it’s-gone Google Reader. Basically I use feeds like emails. Most I delete after reading. Those I want to keep for reference I keep around, marked read.

But not so with these feedreaders. Feeds you want to keep for later reading should preferably be favorited, bookmarked, or maybe saved to a system like Wallabag. This has advantages too, of course. By centralizing your to-read list in one location, like Wallabag or Pocket, you don’t have the problem of remembering what’s where, or that you have loads of unread open tabs in various browsers.

Long story short, after sampling a whole bunch of feedreaders I opted for FreshRSS. It suffers from the omnipresent “no pages” disease. Got a feed with a thousand items? (Yes, they exist.) You can go to the start or the beginning by sorting in ascending or descending order, but reading things somewhere down the middle? Forget it.

These minor inconveniences are worth it, however. This way I can easily read my feeds from any computer anywhere in the world. The feeds are always updated, provided you set up a cron job. I don’t have to start up my computer or risk missing anything if I’m on vacation for a few days. I can quickly check them on my cellphone during an otherwise wasted moment. Overall I’m happy. Goodbye, QuiteRSS. You were a good friend after Opera died, but it’s time to move on.

PS Here are some feed-related links that should go along nicely with any feed reader.

  • Feed Creator allows you to create feeds for webpages that are missing them.
  • So does RSS-Bridge, but since it’s self-hosted it fits perfectly next to FreshRSS in the kluit spirit.
  • Tubes is a tool I wrote a few years back that can filter and fix up feeds. Useful if a website happens to have a feed, but not on a per-category basis or some such. Or of course because you might want to subscribe to an hourly news podcast, but only get the news once a day.

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