Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I stopped appreciating RSS after "below the fold" content started being hidden by default.

It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the glory of a dead innovation ever since.

I don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible. Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason, etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust code execution for what is likely a one-off read).

Some sites*

There are tools like five filters that follow the links, and download the whole story. O think RSS is unusable without them.

Which tools do you recommend?

Feedly does not do this (at least, not by default?), and I consider the experience substandard.

On Apple devices Reeder 5, NetNewsWire and Feedbin all use the Mercury parser API (hosted by Feedbin) to extract the full article text. I believe Fiery Feeds also includes this functionality (with a subscription) although I am uncertain of the process used. Lire is yet another reader that includes this functionality by default.

Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don’t care about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.

If you're on a Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire can fetch and extract the whole article for an individual item, or you can set it to automatically do it for an entire feed: https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view

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