[Discuss] Feedspot and other RSS Readers

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Nancy Allison <nancythewriter7 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi, all.
>
> What do you use to aggregate the things you read? I've stumbled upon
> Feedspot, which costs $$, and I'm wondering if it is necesssary.
>

Other than a few news websites I visit directly in a browser, most of
what I read from the Internet I aggregate with Gnus, which is a USENET
reading package for the emacs text editor that also handles email and
some RSS formats. There's a snippet in the emacs wiki to make it handle
atom feeds, which improves its feed support somewhat. I'm uncertain now
because I don't read many RSS feeds and am not motivated to make them
work when they don't, but I want to say it won't accept some (newer?)
RSS formats too, RSS 2.0 vs. 1.0 maybe, which can be
disappointing. Still, way more than RSS I use gmane and gwene USENET
views of mailing lists and a few websites and it works very well for
those: http://www.gmane.org/

I've looked at separate RSS readers in the past, but over time what
isn't displayed in the same list of "groups" along with my mail and
USENET groups I'll eventually ignore. Two master lists of things to read
doesn't work for me, particularly with Gnus having this helpful feature
of pushing most frequently read groups to the top of my list.

As it is I have way more unread articles than time to read them, so not
getting an RSS feed working is not the worst thing that could
happen. Also, writing emacs lisp is really fun, so if I did find myself
with all kinds of time, I could extend Gnus with backends to handle
various kinds of information I want included in my list.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org