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Tag: rss

  • I continue to fight to make BBC News' RSS feeds not-suck, despite ongoing efforts to dilute their value by the BBC themselves.

    Last month they started injecting ads for their email newsletter-based subscription option into their RSS feed. But I don't need email: I have RSS! The ad initially slipped through the filters because it looks like the URL of a news article: sneaky move, BBC!

    Anyway; it's fixed now and these newsletter ads should no longer appear in the feeds available on https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev - hurrah!

    • Note
    • posted 14 October, 2026
  • Iโ€™m leaving Reddit because of RSS

    For Jeff Johnson, Reddit's ecosystem becoming yet-more closed-down and enshittified, with them dropping RSS support, is the last straw. For me, it would have been too (if I hadn't already abandoned ship nine years prior!).

    Read more (303 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 3 comments
    • posted 1 October, 2026
  • Re: Please let me interact with your blog post!

    Mike lists his preferred ways to interact with blog posts he sees in his feed reader. I look at where my blog satisfies his list, and also suggest a few other contact mechanisms that I, or others, might facilitate.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (706 words)

    • Reply
    • 7 comments
    • posted 23 August, 2026
  • They love RSS

    unstory claims that people who, like, me, announce their love of RSS in footers etc. don't actually love RSS, and couldn't handle operating the protocol 'by hand'. unstory is wrong, at least in my case.

    Read more (337 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 1 comment
    • posted 8 August, 2026
  • Image of an F1 car, half in a low, blocky resolution; half in full resolution.

    BBC News RSS... with full-size thumbnails!

    A user of my Improved BBC News Feeds reached out to suggest that I upgrade the resolution of the thumbnail images. Turns out this was a quick win: my noodles hadn't even cooled before I finished.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (581 words)

    • Article
    • posted 22 April, 2026
  • I Am Experimenting with Blocking HTTP1.1

    Andrew Stephens has added Caddy configuration to prohibit HTTP/1 clients from accessing most of the pages of his website. I decided to probe it and see how that works.

    Read more (400 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 2 comments
    • posted 7 March, 2026
  • Image representing post: Why Appleโ€™s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power

    Why Appleโ€™s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power

    Apple's podcast player's new video standard locks-in video hosting to one of a pre-approved list of providers. What the fuck, Apple?

    Read more - about 3 minutes (696 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • 1 comment
    • posted 1 March, 2026
  • Illustration showing 'slow content' going to FreshRSS, 'immediate content' going to email, Slack, and WhatsApp, and 'fast content' being eligible to be routed to either destination.

    Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS

    Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1014 words)

    • Article
    • 14 comments
    • posted 6 February, 2026
  • Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News' RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same... for the Daily Mail.

    I'm so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say "there you go; that's an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed".

    Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.

    Full image of Email from Simon G to Dan Q, subject "Dail Mail RSS that doesn't suck", with message: Hey Darren, Iโ€™ve come across your BBC RSS feeds and find them really useful over the last few days. Thank you so much for this!! Iโ€™m not sure how easy it is but could you do something similar with the Daily Mail as that has thousands of reposts a week? Happy to contribute/donate.
    Alt

    Email from Simon G to Dan Q, subject "Dail Mail RSS that doesn't suck", with message: Hey Darren, Iโ€™ve come across your BBC RSS feeds and find them really useful over the last few days. Thank you so much for this!! Iโ€™m not sure how easy it is but could you do something similar with the Daily Mail as that has thousands of reposts a week? Happy to contribute/donate.

    • Note
    • 2 comments
    • posted 4 February, 2026
  • RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn't matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap.

    (I'm using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)

    Time to catch up on some news, blogs, etc.!

    • Note
    • 1 comment
    • posted 30 January, 2026
  • Reading type pie chart

    How You Read My Content (The Answers)

    Kev Quirk ran a one-question survey recently about how people discover and read his blog posts, and I think it's a pretty inspiring idea. Sure, consent-based surveying introduces biases... but what analytic technique doesn't, really?

    Read more - about 3 minutes (602 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 22 January, 2026
  • Inspired by a conversation with Elle (@e11e@mastodon.social), I expanded my FreshRSS-to-blogroll generator to support injecting 88ร—31 buttons (where I have them) for folks I follow.

    There's still a way to go, but my blogroll's looking a little prettier as a result.

    • Note
    • 2 comments
    • posted 20 January, 2026
  • For the last few years I've been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.

    This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, because it's the kind of scope-creep that my "uninterested-in-sports-news" brain couldn't conceive that anybody would want! But I got there in the end.

    If anybody's looking for their fill of "BBC News Feeds... But Better!", give it a look.

    • Note
    • 13 comments
    • posted 6 December, 2025
  • Diagram showing how GitHub Actions request and receive an RSS feed, push an update to Whapi, which pushes the update to WhatsApp.

    Pushing RSS to WhatsApp (for free?)

    RSS remains the gold standard for subscribing to Web content... but WhatsApp Channels/Newsletters provide another interesting opportunity for syndication. If only somebody had written an RSS-to-WhatApp integration that could run for free in a GitHub Action? Oh wait, that's what I just did!

    Read more - about 4 minutes (924 words)

    • Article
    • 6 comments
    • posted 23 November, 2025
  • Composite of four images of Dan, a white man with long hair and a beard. He's wearing a hoodie with a picture of Fluttershy (from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) wearing the iconic armour from the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim video game. In each of the four pictures he's wearing a different hat: a rainbow-striped bandana, a blackcap with the word 'GEEK' on the front in white lettering, a warm furry hat, and a purple woolen hat with a "Woo" logo.

    Ten Pointless Facts About Me

    A 'ten questions about yourself' quiz is circulating the blogosphere, and I figured I'd join in (and wear four different hats, in the process).

    Read more - about 7 minutes (1662 words)

    • Article
    • posted 4 November, 2025

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