Going Crazy With RSS
Mar. 18th, 2025 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grayestofghostsSo for a while I have thought that using RSS would get me to stop being crazy on the internet. You can't reply to things in RSS and I would still get updates. And also it lets you get news without it being so panic-inducing, because it just gives you a long thing to read. And yet, you still get your updates, which is nice. So I have been experimenting with that.
I have started trying Feeeed on my phone with limited success, though a lot of it is because I have not quite figured out how to curate stuff that I want to see with it because a lot of the things I want to see are fandom posts on BlueSky and Reddit and these things are pretty diffuse to begin with, and I have a feeling it will take some massaging.
But the other thing I want to do is to be able to read articles on my kobo. I feel like ereaders in general are ideal RSS-reading devices, and yet, for some reason *cough Capitalism cough cough* there hasn't really been a good integrated way to get RSS onto most popular e-readers. So I have been working on it.
Kobo does not have a native RSS reader but it does have Pocket integration. So my first thought was to use that. Pocket is great if you are manually saving articles for later reading, but also, this is not really something I do? If something catches my eye I have to read it then or I forget about it. So, even though I use pocket a lot to save certain things like recipes its intended use is not really ideal for me. There are many services online like IFTTT or Make that allow you to automate "RSS to Pocket", but the free versions of these (and the not-free versions are expensive) only give you like two automations, and because you can't put in multiple RSS URLS into these automations it only gives you access to two feeds per service, which... isn't enough.
My second thought is to use Kobo's Dropbox integration with Calibre's fetch news from RSS feature. This should be great -- you can click the button to fetch your news, then sync with device which means it sends to the dropbox that's connected to your device! I feel like in a normal universe, this would be adequate, except we don't live in a normal universe anymore. News happens so quickly that it's hard to keep up, and I'm not on my laptop every day so I'm unlikely to keep up with it.
If I try to search how to do this online it looks like there are python scripts and such (I don't know Python), but to do that I would need like web server space that I don't have. I don't know. I hate that this seems like it should way easier than it is.
I have started trying Feeeed on my phone with limited success, though a lot of it is because I have not quite figured out how to curate stuff that I want to see with it because a lot of the things I want to see are fandom posts on BlueSky and Reddit and these things are pretty diffuse to begin with, and I have a feeling it will take some massaging.
But the other thing I want to do is to be able to read articles on my kobo. I feel like ereaders in general are ideal RSS-reading devices, and yet, for some reason *cough Capitalism cough cough* there hasn't really been a good integrated way to get RSS onto most popular e-readers. So I have been working on it.
Kobo does not have a native RSS reader but it does have Pocket integration. So my first thought was to use that. Pocket is great if you are manually saving articles for later reading, but also, this is not really something I do? If something catches my eye I have to read it then or I forget about it. So, even though I use pocket a lot to save certain things like recipes its intended use is not really ideal for me. There are many services online like IFTTT or Make that allow you to automate "RSS to Pocket", but the free versions of these (and the not-free versions are expensive) only give you like two automations, and because you can't put in multiple RSS URLS into these automations it only gives you access to two feeds per service, which... isn't enough.
My second thought is to use Kobo's Dropbox integration with Calibre's fetch news from RSS feature. This should be great -- you can click the button to fetch your news, then sync with device which means it sends to the dropbox that's connected to your device! I feel like in a normal universe, this would be adequate, except we don't live in a normal universe anymore. News happens so quickly that it's hard to keep up, and I'm not on my laptop every day so I'm unlikely to keep up with it.
If I try to search how to do this online it looks like there are python scripts and such (I don't know Python), but to do that I would need like web server space that I don't have. I don't know. I hate that this seems like it should way easier than it is.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-19 10:17 pm (UTC)I'm not 100% sure but you may be able to do this with KOreader? Otherwise yeah, the Calibre setup you suggest seems like the most straightforward solution.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-20 08:26 pm (UTC)Zapier allows you to put up to 12 RSS feeds on a function but only allows 100 uses per month. Which *might* be enough, but still seems like too few. Apparently there's also a way to make this app through Glitch.com? I don't know. I may still have to look. Possibly getting more "urgent" news through Zapier/Pocket, or even combined with the others, and less urgent stuff through Calibre might be the way to go.