path: root/posts/rss-a-follow-up.html

--post-date: 2022-12-31
--type: blog
--tags: tech
    <article>
      <h1>RSS - A Follow-up</h1>
      <p>Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!</p>
      <p>Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using
      a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and
      wasted PC time.</p>
      <blockquote>
        <p>this blogpost is originally posted to my gemini gemlog: <a href=
        "gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi">gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi</a>
        which is where I do most of my writing, converting some useful to share
        things over here. It is also where the original RSS gemlog this is a
        follow-up to was posted. For context, I wanted to cutback on a lot of
        my web consumption, wasting time and just being mindless online. So I
        looked to RSS to help centralize and solve this issue.</p>
      </blockquote>
      <h2>Recap</h2>
      <p>So I am using <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
         target="_blank"
         href="https://tt-rss.org">https://tt-rss.org/</a> as my RSS
         aggregator. It’s a self-hosted RSS aggregator that, using profiles,
         allows you to subscribe to multiple feeds and have them “synced”
         between multiple devices (they’re not synced, you’re connecting to a
         central server). I like this because I don’t ever have to worry about
         dismissing, reading, or marking anything on my phone to have it still
         present on my PC. And I don’t have to worry about feed subscriptions
         or my phone pinging a bunch of feeds, or obviously, any third-party
         hosting.</p>
      <h2>How I’ve been using it</h2>
      <p>So as always, please send me interesting RSS feeds! Or even your own!
      I am trying to read more blogs, and if you have something you enjoy drop
      me a DM or email! I’ll share what I am following throughout this section
      &lt;3</p>
      <h3>Blogs</h3>
      <p>Obviously, I am following blogs, one of the last holdouts of RSS. I
      have a few that I follow, mostly other transfolk on Mastodon that I found
      had their own blogs. Most non-trans folks I follow are using gemini and
      still rely on the feed aggregators for that.</p>
      <p>If you’re interested the two main ones I am reading right now are:</p>
      <ol>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://erininthemorn.substack.com">Erin In The Morn
              (substack)</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://www.selfawaresoup.com/">Selfaware Soup</a>
        </li>
      </ol>
      <p>Which have been pretty insightful. Erin sharing a lot of US
      transgender news, which is good since I have dropped off using Reddit
      which is where I “got” my “news” from.</p>
      <h3>Podcasts</h3>
      <p>The other mainstay in RSS is podcasts. Some even say if a podcast
      can’t be consumed via RSS, is it even a podcast? I would agree.
      Everything else is just a show. I don’t <em>need</em> the content to be
      consumable from my reader, but I’d really appreciate it if were. I am
      always on the lookout for more podcasts though. With the only two
      consistent listens being:</p>
      <ol>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://www.relay.fm/penaddict">The Pen Addict Podcast
              (relay.fm)</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://www.relay.fm/cortex">Cortex Podcast (relay.fm)</a>
        </li>
      </ol>
      <p>And currently off-season:</p>
      <ul>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://www.relay.fm/backmarkers">Backmarkers Podcast
              (relay.fm)</a>
        </li>
      </ul>
      <p>Which has a YouTube video format. Though, I honestly really don’t care
      for Austin Evans, I just enjoy consuming some F1 content and pretending I
      have friends I can talk to about motor racing.</p>
      <p>While writing this section I added:</p>
      <ul>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://inside.java/podcast/">Inside.java Podcast</a>
        </li>
      </ul>
      <p>I have yet to listen, some of the topics seem interesting and being
      infrequent gives me hope its quality over quantity. (And I like having
      podcasts for chores to distract my brain)</p>
      <h3>Tech News</h3>
      <p>Right now I follow two main news sources in tech:</p>
      <ol>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://www.debian.org/News/">debian.org/news</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
              target="_blank"
              href="https://lwn.net/">LWN.net</a>
        </li>
      </ol>
      <p>Running servers using stable debian - it’s good to know when security
      updates come in, as well as distro updates. And LWN is fantastic, I’ve
      been a subscriber for many years and while sometimes (Jake) can focus a
      bit heavy on Python news, has been always interesting to read.</p>
      <p>This is the section I plan on adding more and more to. I had other
      tech blogs that just felt like clutter and were pushing out daily
      articles that I couldn’t care less about (opensource.com cough cough).
      But that’s just me. Tech news is mainly where I want to focus - since
      fluff blogs are rarely my cup of tea.</p>
      <p>LWN has some links in their weekly editions for other news feeds I
      might consider directly subscribing too, but for now I have these.</p>
      <h3>Music News</h3>
      <p>Some folk have an RSS feed for their site updates, which I appreciate.
      Some use sites like Squarespace but don’t properly connect up the RSS
      feed which I do NOT appreciate.</p>
      <p>So right now I have two bandsites that DO update it seems (as their
      site aligns with the feed) - but the only one I’ll mention is: <a rel=
      "external noopener noreferrer"
         target="_blank"
         href="https://raisedbyswans.com/">raisedbyswans.com</a> I’ve spoken of
         this artist in my Music Spotlight MANY times and is one of my
         favorites. His site, while entirely simple, is setup with RSS and has
         been publishing his updates consistently. I appreciate this. Always a
         strong rec from me!</p>
      <p>I’ve been toying with Music Review sites that talk about new releases
      in the genres they specialize in, but I haven’t settled on anything that
      is helping me discover new music.</p>
      <h3>YouTube</h3>
      <p>This is probably where the biggest change has actually come in. Having
      my YouTube feed fed through RSS has been fantastic. I am able to not only
      refresh and not miss any updates (since YouTube sometimes likes to pull
      updates in out of order than I don’t see it because it’s buried between
      some other videos that I’d already seen.</p>
      <p>But this also allows me one further level of filtering on my YouTube
      subscriptions. I can stay subscribed to channels I am interested in
      watching <em>occasionally</em> but not every video, and keep those off my
      RSS feed. And for the “I like to watch most if not all the new videos” I
      can subscribe to those via RSS. So it’s like the “bell” but without the
      app basically. And since on Mobile I do NOT use the YouTube app (so I can
      take advantage of the Ad Blocker in Firefox) that’s great!</p>
      <p>What sucks / is tricky is actually subscribing to the RSS feeds
      because YouTube buried that feature now. You just need the channel_id or
      the username and you can subscribe using the following URL:</p>
      <pre><code>https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={ID}
</code></pre>
      <p>And you can obtain the channel_id either using the URL (though with
      aliases now (@channelname) its rare to see a channel_id in the URL) if
      present otherwise a little console JS can print it out:</p>
      <pre><code>ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId
</code></pre>
      <p>A note however - you’ll need to clear the console if you navigate to
      the next channel, at least in Firefox, it caches the result otherwise and
      you’ll print out the duplicate value. There are some tools where you can
      print your subscribers list into these feed URLs and bulk subscribe. I’ve
      lost the link (and it’s what I did initially) but I recommend doing the
      manual add at least to focus on the channels you WANT in RSS, since you
      can always fallback to the main subscriptions page on YouTube.</p>
      <p>But what this has given me is the ability to effectively ignore
      YouTube almost entirely. Ideally, I’d script something with YouTube-dl
      but I don’t REALLY care that much, and I’ve gotten into the habit of
      closing the tab after the video so I don’t stick around and get sucked
      into the algorithm.</p>
      <p>What my morning looks like is sitting down, switching to my tt-rss
      tab, seeing what’s fresh, and watching a video with my coffee maybe, then
      just moving on and doing something else. I still lurk Mastodon, or get
      sucked into my computer in some way or another, but it’s been really
      positive! I can count on one hand how many times since dedicating to RSS
      I’ve just clicked around YouTube.</p>
      <h3>Hobby</h3>
      <p>The last section which really is an extension of Blogs/News is “hobby”
      RSS feeds. These feed a bit into the consumerist side of life and why I
      keep them separate. Right now it’s almost <em>entirely</em> fountain pen
      related (Who&#39;da thought this community would still be writing blogs
      :P) but since most of the blog posts are either about products or reviews
      in some way, I try and limit how much I expose myself to them. I have
      been working on a draft about consumerism for quite a while now and just
      haven’t really worked it into a post that isn’t just DAE consumerism BAD?
      low-effort Toot level. (But basically, I kinda hate how all my hobbies,
      and hobbies in general rely heavily on a consumerism mindset, GAS, and
      such). So I’ve been trying to be more appreciative of what I already have
      and such.</p>
      <p>But these blogs are nice, and often keep in the know about my hobbies
      and can react to anything meaningful that’s being released. A good video
      sorta on this topic was by Adam Neely(<a rel=
      "external noopener noreferrer"
         target="_blank"
         href="https://www.youtube.com/v/mHoljbkyAEs">Adam Neely - How In-Ear
         Monitors are Making Better Musicians</a>), and how his band spend
         $6000 on gear for their tour, but what it did was eliminate stress and
         enable them to more easily fine tune and control how they monitor
         their live performance. He touches on the fact that gear videos feed
         into the consumerist mindset of music making, but gear is often
         necessary to facilitate certain things, and setting up a portable
         in-ear-monitor rig for their entire band is well… unavoidable. It’s
         just a minor aside in a much deeper video about IEMs and touring and
         FEEL. And quite the departure from his usual music education content.
         But it sums up the main thesis of my consumerism gemlog quite nicely I
         feel (or at least I am projecting my thoughts into a brief aside he
         makes).</p>
      <h2>tt-rss - in retrospect</h2>
      <p>So tt-rss is <em>fine</em> honestly, I think I need to setup a better
      theme, something that has a bit more contrast. I don’t REALLY read in it,
      I just use it as the aggregator and then open the links directly. I don’t
      mind the way it renders the full articles with images, but I do mind how
      GREY it is by default (in “night” theme). It looks totally customizable
      and I bet I can download a decent theme for it if I look. But I may spend
      some time doing that and try and read more in application.</p>
      <p>But other than that it’s been quite the improvement over my internet
      experience. More RSS!!</p>
      <h2>Conclusion</h2>
      <p>I need more feeds, as I do enjoy reading. So I’m always on the look
      out. I hate to throw in engagement-y things like “let me know” stuff but
      I am genuinely looking for interesting suggestions for stuff you might
      subscribe to over RSS. Even if it’s just “this is my webblog” :) I always
      like reading people’s things. I should troll the aggregators and look at
      folks capsule landings to see what is linked!</p>
      <p>Anyway, you should look into getting an RSS aggregator setup. It’s
      been really impactful on cutting down on internet scrolling and
      mindlessness.</p>
    </article>