Digesting RSS Feeds

Over the years, I’ve used various methods for processing RSS feeds, based on needs and desires at the time. My journey with RSS began with Google Reader, maybe the original choice in readers, which provided a simple and effective way to keep up with my favorite websites. It worked well, was in the glory days of google supposedly doing no evil (ha!) but ended up getting the axe prematurely (I think a lot of people felt this way).

The Fever Days

After Google Reader, I moved on to self-hosting an RSS application called Fever, developed by Shaun Inman. Fever stood out to me due to its ability to surface popular articles and links shared across multiple sources. This feature made for a highly engaging and efficient reading experience, allowing me to focus on the most noteworthy content (alongside a handful of must-read feeds). I self hosted and used it for a number of years, basically til it disappeared (somebody did fork it and update it for the latest versions of PHP and MYSQL if you are interested in trying it).

Eventually the updates stopped and other options came onto the seen. I explored several of those RSS services like Inoreader, Feed Wrangler and NewsBlur. They each offered different features but in a hosted environment (which was nice). However, as time went on, I found myself seeking a more streamlined approach (that was also a bit less expensive).

The past couple of years I have been settled on NetNewsWire, a powerful and user-friendly RSS reader. It’s open and allows syncing via iCloud rather than depending on a 3rd party hosted solution which is nice. While it does its job well, the constantly growing number of unread articles became a source of stress. Seeing the unread count climb higher and higher made the experience less enjoyable.

At this point I could try to be more intentional - something I didn’t always have time for, not care as much - which I’ve tried to do for awhile, or be liberal with the unsubscribe button. I actually did this but there are many sites that have occasional gold that I’d still like to surface. Fever was good at this and some modern apps can do similar things but it hasn’t been quite the same experience.

Enter Pico.sh

All that aside, a few weeks ago my wife asked for an easy way to access my content. Apparently visiting this site and my photo journal is just too much trouble. That set me on a quest to find a decent RSS-to-email solution and pico.sh was the one that kept coming up. So I decided to try it and fell in love with how nerdy and easy it was.

This got me thinking: what if I managed my own RSS feeds like this? What If I setup a few different emails based off of specific criteria to basically get mini newspapers in my email to explore (when I have time) and ignore peacefully (when I don’t). Using Pico.sh to convert RSS feeds into email updates was super easy so I thought it’d be worth a try.

For me, this approach has proven to be both refreshing and effective (even though I’m only a week in), allowing me to tailor my reading experience based on a desired frequency and content type.

So far, this is what I’ve setup:

• Daily Full Content Updates: I maintain a text file list of RSS feeds for which I want daily updates. Each day at the time the file was synced to Pico.sh, it sends me an email with a list of updated articles from these feeds. This ensures I don’t miss out on any important content from my favorite sites.
• Daily Headlines Only: For more active blogs and sites that I enjoy but don’t need to read every article from, I have another list set to deliver only headlines. This lets me quickly scan titles and select the articles that interest me the most.
• Weekly and Monthly Updates: For sites that update less frequently or have content that isn’t always relevant to me, I have separate lists that send updates on a weekly or monthly basis.
• An Update Script: I built this - it’s just a bash script so nothing special. On the command line, it takes a flag (which denotes the file to update) and a feed address (which gets appended to the list)
• rsync then does the job to upload the list.txt files to pico.sh.

I’m hoping this system will reduce stress and enhancing my reading experience. By customizing the frequency and type of updates, I can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.

To close I’ll add - It’s not fully formed yet. I’m considering breaking the daily feed into topical digests and I know I’ll need to fine tune the feed placement (ie, some feeds in daily might be better suited for weekly and so on). If you’re struggling with RSS feed overload though, maybe consider something similar! This week its been somewhat active has actually been really nice.