Feed experiments

Recently, I've been experimenting with (e.g. RSS or Atom) "feeds"; it's quite a nice technology which I've largely ignored while consuming. (I've had problems getting feeds to work on the "Joomla!" CMS including the photos from a gallery plug-in -- only the processing directives for the plug-in turned up -- but that's rather on the producing side.)

With this technology, the computer/program can process items (articles, comic strips, or also just any kind of repeating or automated information that may be useful to someone regularly?) from a web-site piece-by-piece (instead of web page-wise). This enables different possibilities, from sending as emails (ugh! want to get away from emails, not get even more of them!) to live-showing as Desktop notifications; but the most popular application maybe is the "Feed Reader".

Currently, I'm experimenting with the "Feedbro" Firefox web-browser extension on the Desktop/Notebook/PC, and the "Feeder" Android-App from the f-droid repository of free and open-source software, on mobile. I'm trying to have only few/lightweight feeds on the mobile app, as it's easy to get overwhelmed with information while using a feed reader, and may be impossible (or undesirable) to catch up, after missing out for a few days (as also suggested by a friend who tried using an RSS reader multiple times but ended up never looking at it again, due to this problem).

I'm not sure if I can keep up with what I've currently configured in the Desktop web browser, especially as some automated news items keep coming up again and again; though this may be a problem particular to Feedbro which I'm using there.

Here are some possibly-interesting feeds I've collected for the experimenting:

  • Humour:
  • Debian:
  • Oh dear, there are no other concrete resources left that I'd have liked to give as examples... (after eliminating what I'd not recommend to try (again))

  • Some more suggestions:

    • Log in to your GitHub profile and subscribe to your "private feed"; it should be something like: https://github.com/ACCOUNTNAME.private.atom?token=...

    • Subscribe to your own website/blog/... (if it got a feed) to learn about, e.g., comments in a timely manner. Maybe also the sites you're an admin for.

    • If you care about a specific Debian package's evolution, perhaps due to having contributed to it, you can subscribe to its Debian package news,
      e.g., https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/PACKAGENAME/rss
      (via https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/PACKAGENAME).

      Be warned, though, that at least Feedbro (see above) sees the frequent automatic updates to automatically generated "action items" as a completely new post, all the time. It might therefore help to add an early, non-fallthrough rule to automatically mark as read everything whose article URL starts with https://tracker.debian.org/action-items/, or alternatively match against specific action-items instances by number.

    • Maybe subscribe to your favourite (or most recently discovered) Free Software project's news feed. It may be interesting, it may also be annoying, though ...

    • Or subscribe to the (e.g. GitHub) commits feed of your friend's long forgotten project; maybe it'll keep you up-to-date when/if it should become active again, or you'll have a nice test for how, e.g., Feedbro displays hundreds/thousands of days of inactivity in the feed stats...