#FreshRSS

[codeandcanvas]

Recapping the week

Even today, we spent a few more hours refining our research and information tool we call Grafikdesignfeed (I have written about it here before), to cover some more topics and to improve our custom search queries with filters as well.

On the topic of filters: I usually do not have any blocks in place on any social media website (i.e. usually I do not block people/accounts), but I am under the impression that, should I want to use social media as a research tool in the future (looking for what people do and say about certain topics), then I should start using filters there as well.

Because I want to do that.

Also, I am adding more books I want to read in 2025 from my Bücherregal page on my website to my Goodreads “Want to Read” list as well, which I originally started out doing, but then some ideas for our FreshRSS service came up… you know how it is: it is not procrastination, it’s more like cleaning up after having ceased to be a perfectionist with a really long to-do list: you work through these things so they don’t occupy space in your mind any longer.

Speaking of Goodreads: being the way things are, certain books (mostly ones written in German) can’t be found on Goodreads, so I eventually had to decide to add them there myself. By joining the Goodreads Librarians Group, I can add a book missing from the database myself (a thing I remember having done for the first time some ten years ago now).

So, scrolling down the page on which services are supported for both book data and cover images, I found that the German Deutsche Nationalbibliothek is supported, which is Germany’s national library (everything published in Germany is most likely there), but which in my case led nowhere. So I went with the publisher’s website instead as the source of book data and cover image. Fingers crossed the people at Goodreads accept this contribution (found it on Amazon as well, after looking for it on WorldCat, did not find it by searching for it on Amazon directly, using its ISBN though – odd). You can see my book request here, if you are into that.

From my bookshelf page on my website, I copy and paste the titles into my Zotero, copy the ISBN from there (to make sure I add the right version of the book on Goodreads to my “Want to Read” list; there are versions of books 😖) and drop it into Goodreads.

Ideally, I can move on with the next book right away, but otherwise I need to do the extra step described above.

In the end, there is only one more book left over which I need to add the same way as above. And that book is very special, in a lot of ways (but not special in the way Knauer’s Transformation is: as much as I enjoy ergodic literature, when the ergodism leaves the page and starts to format the book, things get really unusable really quickly), so I will add it after my first request goes through.

Just something to add to my ever-shrinking to-do.

Neat reading list. Looks like I moonlight as a librarian of sorts, as well as moonlighting as a hacker and illustrator.

Now, I am installing Monster Hunter: World, because I crave the exploration and extracting the resources from the world around me.

[dan--q]

5 Cool Apps for your Unraid NAS

Some suggested starting apps for your Unraid NAS, inspired by a conversation this week with a teammate who’s an aspiring Unraider. Selfhosting FTW!

Read more...

[ramenjunkie]

Friday 2025-04-25 - Link List

Blogging Intensifies Link List for Friday 2025-04-25 24-Apr-2025 – HAIM have announced their fourth album ‘I quit’ Brief Summary: “HAIM have announced their fourth studio album ‘I quit’, set for release via Polydor Records on 20th “ Personal Notes and Commentary: “” 23-Apr-2025 – Yes, We Do Know You, Trump-Supporting MAGAs. That’s the Problem. Brief Summary: ” Republishe” Personal Notes and…

[proggay]

am i officially a nerd? i set up a self-hosted rss reader to get information that way instead of using google discover news feed thing

[lensdeer]

wish I could tell every piece of software ever that I type with 100% accuracy and I don't need it assuming I fucking mistyped everything constantly

[liquidcrystalsky]

I just pulled this 2009 hp out of the dumpster what do i do with it. It has ubuntu.

if it's that old, probably wipe and reinstall. If you're doing ubuntu again first uninstall snap but there's a lot of neat self-hosting stuff you can do with an old PC.

I have a little RasPi in my basement which runs an RSS Feed aggregator(FreshRSS), some calendars(Radicale) and notes(Joplin) so they're synced between all my devices.

If the computer has the storage and a little bit of power for processing things you could also run something to sync all your photos (Immich) and files (Nextcloud, which also does images but i like Immich better for it) between ur devices so you can avoid having to use paid services which may or may not be selling your data or whatever.

You can have it run a self hosted VPN such as WireGuard which you can port forward so you can use it from anywhere, or you can use a service like Tailscale which doesn't require port forwarding, but it's not something you host yourself, they have their own servers.

You can also put all the services behind a reverse proxy (nginx Proxy Manager, NOT nginx, i mean it's good but it's much harder) and be able to access it through a proper domain with SSL(a vpn will already do this though) instead of whatever 192.168.whatever, again, only accessible by people On That VPN.

All things are available (and usually encouraged) to run through docker, and they often even have their own compose files so it's not too much setup. (it's maintenence to update things though)

Also have fun and play tuoys. Old computers run modern versions of linux much better than windows. just open it up see what u can do with it, get used to it, try to customize the desktop to how you like it, or try another one (Ubuntu comes with GNOME. please try another one). See what works and what doesn't (hardware will likely be the issue if something doesn't work though, not linux itself). Something like Plasma or Cinnamon works just like a normal windows computer but there's still a bit of that "learning how to use a computer" that you don't really get after using the same version of windows for 10 years.

[debian-official]

chat I wanna replace FreshRSS with something that feels nicer. Any suggestions for self hosted aggregators?

[unpretty]

normally i am the first person to agree with hating a website/service making a bunch of changes out of nowhere, but the inoreader revamp might actually stop me from switching to freshrss

[ranmagender]

i feel like RSS feeds are kind of like libraries, in that if they were brought up as an idea today they would not be accepted by like corporations and actively pushed away because its not consumption by way of an algorithm.

Twitter already has just removed the ability to have rss feeds completely for instance. Theres workarounds but like like most of these big tech companies dont like RSS. Google does not like RSS thats why they killed Google Reader (RIP)

RSS is a nice and neat system to deliver content, curated by the user themselves, theres a reason why podcasts use rss feeds because its a good system but thats not profitable anymore, hasnt been profitable for quite some time.

Even with podcasts Spotify doesnt like that so spotify exclusive podcasts, no rss feed, gotta keep you in the ecosystem.

Tumblr thankfully has rss, its usually just the blog url and then /rss.

i know im probably sounding like a corkboard string guy but like idk, i just like rss, i host my own rss reader software i use all the time, freshRSS. theres no purpose to my rant other than complaining about techno-capitalism and evangelizing rss feeds

[andmaybegayer]

also, if you're a regular around here and you want a free cloud based RSS reader and you're fine with zero uptime guarantees and the risk of me being able to see what feeds you read, hit me up for an account on my FreshRSS instance.

[codeandcanvas]

You can (re)build a service

Due to the world’s toughest internet laws, running a service which posts the best graphic design articles in Germany is not an easy thing to do.

Things like self‑hosting, reposting on your own domain, and so on are absolutely out of the question, unless you are really keen on testing out the limits of your (legal) budget.

So we slowly started rebuilding our project grafikdesignfeed using freshrss, ifttt, buffer and free socials.

The logic is as follows:

freshrss gathers all kinds of rss‑feeds, we favorite the articles we think are cool, these get sent to IFTTT where an applet takes these favorites, sends them to a buffer account which sends these favorites to (as of now) our account on Bluesky and our account on X (we are working on more socials as well, but that takes time; not work, just time, so we are waiting) and that is the whole machine called grafikdesignfeed.

We are doing this because we want to provide a service to the German‑speaking part of the (not only graphic) design world, and because we really like building useful little machines like this one.

Who knows, maybe you like using our machines as well?

[dan--q]

Feed Readers Beat Doomscrolling

If you’re dodging news media because the alternative is catastrophic doomscrolling… perhaps you ought to be using a feed reader? It’s a much healthier way to keep up with the Web.

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[ramenjunkie]

Friday 2025-04-25 - Link List

Lameazoid Link List for Friday 2025-04-25 25-Apr-2025 – Godzilla hammer from Japan lets you smash nails like a kaiju Brief Summary: ” Modelled on Godzilla’s actual foot, scanned from the suit used in the 2001 film. In Japan, kaiju i” Personal Notes and Commentary: “For when you need to build a new house after a monster attack.” 24-Apr-2025 – LEGO Ideas ラーメン。 Ramen Achieves 10,000…

[trainsinanime]

Actually do you have any recomendations for a RSS reader on mobile, preferably browser-based? All the ones I found are horrible

Personally I'm using Reeder, but that's an app that is only on Apple platforms. For browser-based ones, I think Feedly is the most popular one, and it's what I use for syncing between different devices. But the company is a bit sketchy, so I am also low-key looking for alternatives.

I have been experimenting with FreshRSS, which is something you run on your own web server if you have one (requires PHP and some SQL database). I think that's a great option in theory, but too complicated for most people in practice (personally, I still haven't managed to get it working with Reeder, even though it's supposed to work).

So to all my followers: What would you recommend?

[rootresident]

My RSS Obsession

I pretty recently (as in a few months ago) set up my local dashboard using Glance, which is a great project by the way, and decided to get some RSS feeds onto it. I have a few feeds for local news and some tech blogs and such, but my real interest is art. I follow a lot of artists, too many to even keep track of. Logging on to Tumblr to post this I was presented with the amazing work of yuumei-art.

And so, with the motivation of getting as much rad artwork on my dashboard as I can, I have begun the journey into RSS feed wrangling. If you're not familiar, an RSS feed is essentially an online news bulletin. The feed publishes a list of 'articles' which a client can reference to find the content. Normally a site would need to publish its own feeds, like Tumblr where you can add /rss to anyone's blog url, but there are tools to generate feeds where there aren't any (this will be the core of this post).

The Challenge

If you use, or have used, RSS then you know that whether a site offers an RSS feed is pretty hit or miss. Generally if it's a blogging site it will have one, but beyond that it's decreasingly common. And when you start talking about images and social media? Almost non-existent. That's where some neat tools meant to create RSS feeds come into play. I'll get into the details shortly, but the gist of it these tools scrape a web page in order to extract content and then generate an RSS feed of said content. The biggest hurdle in this endeavor, as you may have gleaned, is that the majority of social media sites have some form of anti-bot protections. And what is web scraping if not the pinnacle of bottish behavior? Well, that honor may in fact go to AI, but we're not here to talk about that.

My Solution

Emphasis on the 'my' as there are several good tools out there, and many more ways to combine them. My journey begins with fruitlessly looking at online services for RSS feed generation and being utterly disgusted by the exorbitant prices they charge for very few feeds. Perhaps were I not the way that I am a measly 5 feeds would be plenty, however I currently have 25 for art alone.

If it were not obvious, I did not settle on any of these purse-hungry online services, so I turned my attention to selfhosted solutions. In hindsight, it's somewhat odd I didn't start there considering the amount of time I sink into my lab, but frankly it didn't take long to arrive there anyway. The two projects which made it into deployment were RSSHub and rssBridge, winner gets to stay. They are essentially the same thing, however RSSHub doesn't have a GUI for getting feed URLs. Both offer various plugins/extensions for many different sites, including Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky, which were my main focuses for following art accounts.

Initial Strategy

I started with Instagram as that is where the majority of accounts I follow lived, however I quickly discovered the hell that Instagram puts you through if you're suspected of being a bot. It took me several days of fighting in vain before I gave up and followed these accounts elsewhere when possible, and simply mourned the loss of the rest.

I added each feed to Glance, which as I mentioned is quite a few feeds, and once I got everything working (with the addition of an image proxy, and abandoning rssBridge) I was quite happy for some time. Frustratingly, Glance took some significant time to load all of these feeds, and it refreshes feeds fairly often which meant that a new tab took up to 30 seconds to be useful. This is annoying, but I was happy enough for a few months.

Refinements

After several months of being mildly annoyed each time I needed to wait for my dashboard to load, I decided to do something about it. To their credit, Glance made some updates to try and improve the performance, however my veritable buffet of feeds was still too much. Enter FreshRSS. What I needed all along was a feed aggregator to act as a manager and middleman for Glance. Now FreshRSS is responsible for watching my feeds and pulling the content, and then serving them to Glance. This also means I can configure Glance with one feed per category, and as I add new feeds to FreshRSS it will automatically get picked up in Glance as well. Since all the feeds are served to Glance as a single feed it massively speeds things up, and it also helps keep things reliable.

I mention reliability because sites like Twitter often rate limit you if you make too many requests in a short amount of time, and since Glance requests updates quite often this means I would periodically lose some feeds. FreshRSS both limits refreshes to once per hour and keeps the feed content, meaning any feed is only updated once per hour. This can be changed, but I find it works well for my purposes.

That is pretty much my current setup: anything that doesn't offer its own feed gets pulled using RSSHub, which uses an image proxy to load any images (this helps get around security settings that can prevent getting images properly without it), and the content is saved and reshared by FreshRSS, which only keeps 1 month's worth of articles.

Final Thoughts

I left out a lot of the finer details, such as social media tokens and cookies for RSSHub and usage details, but that's not really the point here. If you're willing to put in the effort and feel like you're going crazy, why not get into extremely convoluted and overly complex systems for looking at cool pictures? Or if news is more your style, kill-the-newsletter is a great tool for getting RSS feeds from email newsletters.