RSS feed readers are the most effective way to stay on top of the news you want. With all of the advancements in technology, we have yet to see something that really surpasses the effectiveness and simplicity of an RSS feed aggregator, and that’s why pretty much every news website still offers an RSS feed (that includes XDA, by the way).
There are plenty of feed aggregators out there, with the most popular arguably being Feedly. Personally, though, I’mn not a big fan of the user experience in Feedly or many of the modern news aggregators, so I would much rather run my own — which, yes, is a thing you can do. I recently discovered…
RSS feed readers are the most effective way to stay on top of the news you want. With all of the advancements in technology, we have yet to see something that really surpasses the effectiveness and simplicity of an RSS feed aggregator, and that’s why pretty much every news website still offers an RSS feed (that includes XDA, by the way).
There are plenty of feed aggregators out there, with the most popular arguably being Feedly. Personally, though, I’mn not a big fan of the user experience in Feedly or many of the modern news aggregators, so I would much rather run my own — which, yes, is a thing you can do. I recently discovered Miniflux, and it’s already my favorite way to stay on top of my news.
Easy to set up
Just load it up on your NAS
Right off the bat, setting up Miniflux is incredibly easy, which already makes it a great solution for keeping on top of news you care about. I set it up in TrueNAS, and there really wasn’t much to it at all, though the steps will vary depending on where you want to host it.
Using the Apps section in TrueNAS Scale, I simply looked up Miniflux and set it up with the necessary passwords and username. As usual, I created a dataset manually for storing its data so I can have more control over what’s happening. Miniflux is a tiny app, and it was deployed quickly.
Once I access the web UI, I could easily go into my feed list and import an OPML file containing a few of the feeds I care about. You can also export your current list, should you ever choose to move to a different platform.
Of course, you can also add feeds manually with their URL, and Miniflux even offers a bookmarklet you can add to your browser’s toolbar to automatically add an RSS feed for any website to your personal feed. It’s a really nice, well-rounded tool.
Simple and straight to the point
Plus, it’s free
A problem with a lot of modern RSS feed readers, including Feedly, is that they seem to think it’s never enough to just be a feed reader that gives you your news. Sometimes they can have overly fancy UIs that delay how quickly you can get to your news, and in many cases, you also can’t just view an article in your feed in full without going to the original website, which can be riddled with ads or unnecessary UI elements itself.
Miniflux takes a very minimalistic approach to its design, and while that can be boring, it’s a great way to live up to the goal of an RSS feed: deliver the content you want in one place, no extra fuss. By default, you have the Unread page that shows you all your unread articles, with options to mark everything as read in one go, or page by page, so you can clear a backlog easily. I usually do like a bit more flair, but when I’m looking at dozens of news articles, it’s nice to be able to quickly parse through all of them in a simple way without any fluff. It’s also a progressive web app, so you can easily add it to your phone’s homescreen or view it on your desktop. If you prefer, you can also create categories to organize your news sources into, so you can focus on specific topics one at a time.
The article viewer itself is also minimalistic in the best way. When you click a headline, you can see a featured image and a small excerpt of the article, something many RSS feed readers do. But what I like is that I can easily read the full article by clicking the Download button, which gives me the text, images, and other important elements of the page without the clutter, so I get a clean reading view. Miniflux also removes all kinds of tracking elements used by sites, so your activity is as private as possible.
Of course, if something doesn’t look right, there is a link to go to the original website too. I can always choose to do that if I need to, but most of the time, I prefer reading in the cleaner UI of Miniflux. Plus, there are many RSS feed apps that can actually sync with Miniflux, too, so you can still get a more friendly UI if you don’t want something so simple.
You can get notifications, too
On whatever platform you prefer
Sometimes, you may not want to have to wait until you open your RSS reader to get the latest news, so setting up notifications is also a great way to stay on top of things without having to go actively hunting for them. Thankfully, Miniflux also integrates with a wide range of notification services you can use to make things easier for yourself. These include other self-hosted platforms like Ntfy, but there are dozens of options you can look into, including a Discord or Telegram bot.
I did try setting this up with a Telegram bot I created myself, and unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work. Despite entering the necessary information, I wasn’t able to get notifications for new articles, but it’s certainly possible I configured something incorrectly. There are examples of it working, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m doing something wrong.
Otherwise, if you use an app that syncs with Miniflux, you can also set up notifications through there, so you have multiple options.
A better way to follow the news
RSS feed readers are my favorite way to stay on top of the news in topics I care about. I’ve had a group of tech-related news for years, along with one for gaming, so it’s easy for me to stay on top of the news I care about. Having it all in Miniflux allows me to stay in control of everything and to have a server with news that stays in sync across my devices without having to give my data to any third-party company.