How to follow blogs through a feed reader extension

[ljwrites]

Do you ever get sick of the DW Reading page? It's limited by pagination, you can't switch between title-only and full views, and in order to subscribe to offsite feeds for blogs such as Blogger or Tumblr you have to create feed accounts, which are essentially public offsite feed aggregators that don't require consent from the bloggers.(1)

With a feed reader and some initial setup you can get a seamless and customizable page of your subscriptions, navigable with shortcut keys, with alerts if you want them, in detailed or abbreviated view, and subscribe across sites without the moral rights and copyright pitfalls associated with creating an unauthorized public copy of other people's content. And yes, you still get access to your locked posts.

There are a lot of options when it comes to feed readers, from dedicated apps to online accounts, and everyone's needs are different. If you want a single page from which to follow social media accounts that don't support RSS/Atom feeds as well as blogs that do, something like FlowReader may be of interest to you.

In this post I will discuss setting up a browser extension, Brief for Firefox, which follows actual feeds and not all types of social media accounts. It doesn't have mobile synchronization, which I don't need because I don't like reading blogs from mobile. If you want more features than this extension offers I encourage you to look up the other options out there. If you're not sure where to start with feed readers, maybe this setup will be a way for you to get a better feel for their ins and outs and of your own needs.

So what is a feed/RSS?

You can read about the basics of RSS, RSS specifications, and about Atom, a newer feed standard. At their most basic RSS and Atom feeds are text files that contain information about a set number (say, 10, 20, or 25) of recent posts marked up so that feed readers can tell when the post was made, what the title is, who the author is, and also get an excerpt of the post itself depending on the setting.

Does anyone use it anymore?

It's true that feeds are considered old technology; my own main browser, Firefox, stopped supporting feeds natively in favor of focusing on other development areas. Feeds are, however, still pretty broadly supported by blogging sites such as Dreamwidth, Wordpress, and Tumblr, and even on browsers like Firefox that have ceased native support you can consume feeds with extensions like Brief. So it is very doable to replace your reading page with a more convenient and seamless interface and maybe follow a few non-DW blogs plus sites that offer feeds.

Install Brief

As a first step you should install and activate the Firefox extension Brief. All you have to do is click the "Add to Firefox" button, and the extension should be enabled by default.

If you have successfully installed and activated Brief, a couple of changes should appear on your browser. An orange RSS icon with arced lines emanating from a dot should show up in the upper right corner of your browser window. This is the button you can click to view your feed tab, which will initially be empty other than menu items. In addition, the same icon should appear to the right of your location bar when you are on a site that you can get a feed subscription to. This is your subscription button and how you will populate your feed page.

Subscribe to feeds

Navigate to the blog or other site you want to subscribe to and click the "subscribe" button to the right of your location bar. In the case of DW journals, you will get something like this:

DW offers two options for journal feeds, RSS on all entries or Atom on all entries. I chose Atom for my feeds. Other blogging software or sites might offer sitewide feeds, comment feeds and so on. Choose the option or options you like; these subscriptions will be added to your Brief feed page.

An alternative way of subscribing to feeds is to navigate to the feed file itself, such as https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/data/atom, and pressing the "Subscribe" button there. This can be useful if you need to subscribe to a feed with authentication, as seen below in the section on locked posts and access. This method is less reliable than subscribing from the main page, however, because due to the age of the technology and the cessation of native support the browser may trigger a download of the file instead of navigating to it. This doesn't happen with DW feeds, but I have seen it happen on other sites.

ETA: See also a fantastic compilation by unpretty on how to find feeds on different sites (via jesse_the_k, thank you!). Again, the caveat about browser behavior applies; when I tried to go to a Mastodon profile's feed on Firefox it downloaded the file instead of navigating to it. You can, however, use the subscribe button as described above. Just navigate to a profile and you'll see the button as usual.

A note on locked posts and access

Here's an advantage of consuming feeds from your browser: The DW feeds you subscribe to on Brief will also contain any locked posts that you have access to, since it shares your Firefox login cookies. If you do not have DW login cookies on Firefox or would like to consume feeds from a different app, you can add ?auth=digest to the URL of the DW feed and subscribe to that, such as https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/data/atom?auth=digest. This will cause an authentication prompt to come up, making you confirm your login credentials and granting you access as set up by the journal owner. For more details see the Dreamwidth FAQ on the issue.

Navigating your feeds

Your subscribed feeds will appear in the left-hand column of your Brief feed page, and the feed items will appear in the right-hand main panel. You can see just headlines or full items using the icons on top, or by toggling between them with the H key.

Navigating feeds is pretty straightforward. You can simply scroll through your feeds, or you can move up a feed item with the J key, down with K, scroll down a screen length with U, and up with I. For a full list of keys see Options >> Keyboard Shortcuts.

You can also apply some basic filters on the left-hand navigation column. You can view all items, today's items, your bookmarked items, and trash. Icons at the top of the right-hand panel (and their corresponding keyboard shortcuts) give you additional actions and viewing options as well, such as marking all items read and viewing unread items.

You can also filter by feed; clicking on the feed names on the left-hand navigation column lets you view items from only that feed, which is useful if you want to check on items from a single journal or site.

Organizing your feeds

You can rearrange your feeds by by clicking on the Organize button at the top of your navigation column. This will turn the portion of the column that contains the feed titles orange, at which point you can drag the individual feed titles around to change their order. Click Organize again and you are back to normal mode.

More powerful is the ability to organize your feeds into folders. You can create folders by clicking Organize and then clicking the ellipses backgrounded in white that appear at the bottom of the navigation column. Type in your folder name, hit Enter, and you have a new folder. Drag feeds into this folder to organize your feeds however you like--by site, subject matter, the letters of the alphabet, friends and enemies lists. You can create subfolders within folders by, again, clicking Organize and clicking on the ellipses that appear within folders.

You can click on folders to filter feed items, much like clicking on individual feeds but in groups of your choosing. You can also collapse folders to get a shorter, more organized view of your feed list when you don't need to view individual feed titles.

More customization and backup

You can go to Options >> Options to change settings for things like update frequency, notification for new items (I turned mine off because it got really distracting really soon), sort order, and whether to set an expiration period for downloaded items.(2) You can also customize the style of your feed viewer if you want to, say, increase font sizes or change background and text colors.

Once you have the feeds set up to your liking you'll probably want to back up your feed list which you can do with Options >> Export Feeds. Next time you can import your feeds and get your subscribed feeds back.

In conclusion

This has been your guide on subscribing to feeds with the Firefox extension Brief. I hope this exploration of the arcane, nearly-lost art of feed readership has been helpful to you. Use this knowledge well, traveler.

Notes
1. To be sure it's not permanent and goes back about two weeks, but that's still significantly further back than the current item count in most feeds: Where a blog's feed might expose the 20 most recent items, a DW feed account can hold something like 140 items from the past 14 days. The feed account doesn't--can't--respect the original blogger's deletions and editing choices past a certain point because it doesn't have actual access to the blog's database, only what was published to the feed. That means that a post a blogger chose to delete after it expired from the feed can live on in the feed account for a while longer.
2. Yes, this does mean that you can keep feed items forever--or more likely, until your hardware dies or our current civilization self-destructs, whichever comes first. This being for your own private consumption rather than on a public repository, though, I think it's far less fraught than making a public offsite copy of other people's posts.