Another day, another adventure / experiment in self hosting something.

FreshRSS interface, installed as a web app in macOS

I’ve recently gotten a new job, so I’m faced with the bleak prospect of transitioning from a happy unemployed life into one where I need to at least pretend to be beholden to the whims of others for 8 hours a day.  So I’m about to lose a lot of free time and should probably look into ways to use what I will be left with in more intelligent ways.

Starting with: I realized that I spend a lot of time opening various news sites to see if there are new articles that I’m interested in, and then I wind up scrolling through old articles if there aren’t new ones and… well, this isn’t a great use of time.

Enter RSS, possibly the oldest web technology (it dates back to 1999!) that I’ve never really interacted with.  I was vaguely familiar with it as a way of aggregating news feeds, and I have one friend who has sung its praises in the past, so naturally I went to him for advice.

He recommended something called InoReader, and that lead me to my first discovery regarding RSS.  I had assumed that you just installed an RSS client, like you would install a web browser or FTP client, and it went out and checked for articles on your news feeds and served them up to you in a handy list.

This turns out not to be the case.  Rather, the RSS readers I found all assume that you are using a third party service that does the checking and aggregation and then you log into that third party service to read them, and that wasn’t quite what I was looking for.

A few months ago, I probably would have kinda fumed about this and either signed up for one of these services or – more likely – have given up on the whole idea.  That was before I got into the habit of wondering whether there was a way to do it with my own server infrastructure, and less than a minute after having this thought I was looking at the “Apps” tab in Unraid, which is where you can find all of the pre-built docker containers.

A few minutes after that, I had downloaded FreshRSS, done some very minimal configuration (selected a different port since there was a port conflict with another container) and was happily adding feeds… sorta.  Not every site has a handy RSS button – in fact, they seem pretty uncommon, probably for reasons I’ll get into in a minute.

On the other hand, a surprising number of sites allow you to just append a /feed to the end of their main URL to get the RSS feed.  So even if there’s no handy button for it, most sites DO support RSS, if only to a point – and that point extends to the actual content they are willing to present via RSS.  Many sites only give you a tiny article abstract or the first few lines of an article, and some just give you a list of article titles.  This makes sense, though, since naturally they aren’t just putting news up as a public service.  They want you to read their articles on their sites so you see all of the ads surrounding them, and so they get all sorts of exciting click through metrics and can drop tracking cookies on you and so on and so forth.

Which is fine!  It’s good to want things.  Personally, I want to read all of their content for free and never see an ad.  There’s obviously a conflict here.

I haven’t found a total solution for this, but I did find a couple of plugins for FreshRSS that will do things like load webcomics (“Comics in feed“) or try to load complete articles rather than abstracts (“Af_Readability“). Honestly, they haven’t been super effective, but they have improved the experience a bit.  And even for sites where I’m stuck getting tiny excerpts instead of full articles, it’s made it so I can decide whether it’s really important enough to actually click through to the site or whether the info in the excerpt is enough.

This has saved me a LOT of time, and it’s helping me clean up my browser bookmarks as well.

Also, since RSS isn’t giving me the “comments” sections on these articles, I am avoiding getting sucked into rage-induced spirals where I keep reading the absolute dumbest takes, one after another.  Big win!

Now I just need something like this for Reddit, and I need to find a way to keep myself from clicking on the “For You” tab on X.  Both of those would give me a lot of time back.

Update:  It turns out you can add “.rss” to the end of virtually any Reddit URL to create a feed from it.  So, http://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming.rss gives me an RSS feed for that particular subreddit.  It’s not a great reader, but it lets me only click through to the main web site if the article looks interesting.