gabriel @gabriel@mastodon.uy

Hoy charla sobre Clima Espacial en el Museo Meteorólogico del Colegio Pío en Colón entre las 15 y 18hs, entrada libre. Actividad en el marco de Montevideo + Museos http://www.descubrimontevideo.uy/es/montevideo-museos. Nuestra participacion es gracias a la invitacion del Municipio G. La charla se repetira cada 45 min.

Freedombone Blog https://blog.freedombone.net/ wrote the following post https://blog.freedombone.net/rss-adventures Tue, 22 May 2018 00:34:30 +0200
RSS Adventures
RSS Adventures https://blog.freedombone.net/rss-adventures

RSS is an old technology, but still useful. It's disappointing that it's not better supported by browsers but that's understandable given that it's a system which tends to make it easy to view content without adverts or other distracting links/images. I'm pretty sure that's the main reason why Google stopped supporting it when they controversially dropped their own reader.

I've been running Tiny Tiny RSS for a long time. The server software is modified so that it grabs new feeds via Tor, and this helps to avoid having any third parties gaining knowledge of what you're reading. The last I read, the maintainer of TT-RSS still has no interest in supporting proxying via Tor.

TT-RSS is great, but it's also quite complicated and the reading experience on mobile has been frustratingly flaky. As time passes I'm starting to read RSS feeds more on mobile devices and less on desktop operating systems with large screens. I've tried most (possibly all) of the various TT-RSS mobile readers for small screens, and didn't like any of them very much. So I was wondering if I could replace TT-RSS with something simpler which would work both on desktop and mobile. Searching around on Github I found an existing project with not much code and adapted it until it was sufficiently usable. The result is a new RSS reader called Smol RSS https://github.com/bashrc/smolrss.

Smol RSS, as the name suggests, is a very small php system which allows you to select a feed from a drop down list and then view it. The way that it works is such that the feed is grabbed locally within your browser and not by the server. So installing to an onion address means that when you're browsing through feeds there isn't an easy way for a third party to know what you're reading. Orbot now supports version 3 onion addresses, so this also gives a good level of confidentiality. Unless you give out the onion address it would be hard for anyone to know what it is or that you are associated with it.

Smol RSS is an extremely minimal reader, so there are no advanced features like in TT-RSS. But for my purposes this is good enough and a lot more convenient. It's now an app within https://freedombone.net/, and I added both light and dark themes which are selectable via app settings in the admin control panel.

why not just use a native mobile app for RSS? I could do that, but having something on a server means that there's more convenience when using multiple mobile devices. I can set up the feeds list in a single place and then that applies no matter where I access it from.

#rss #freedombone #smolrss