It's even worse than it appears..
Saturday May 28, 2022; 12:14 PM EDT
  • It's not really a secret that I'm working on a new feed reader. #
  • It's part of a top-to-bottom review of the feed ecosystem, almost 20 years after RSS 2.0. #
  • So here's where we're at in 2022: #
    • Feeds still work, that's the good news. #
    • The bad news is that feeds have same junk in them as web pages. Spyware. Advertising. Stuff that's meant to call your attention to their stuff, and take it away from the other stuff. The problem is this -- as a reader I want these things to calm down and just let me skim, to decide what I want to read. That's the design, that's how feeds were meant to work, imho. #
  • So the question is what to do about the noise? Here's the plan. As with all my previous aggregators, I'm stripping the markup to provide a quiet reading environment. But I'm putting back the features I want, linking, bold and italic, by allowing the feed to provide the Markdown source of the post. If it's present, we'll use that to render the item in the reader, not the description element. #
  • Here's an example of a feed item that include the source of the post in Markdown. #
  • That's it. I think an elegant solution. One of the nice things about Markdown is it lets through the stuff we want, and doesn't let through the stuff we don't. Right? 🚀#
  • Basically the feeds can keep doing what they want, no problem -- but we'll just take the text. And if they want to add a link that we'll see, they can use Markdown. #

Last update: Saturday May 28, 2022; 11:38 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)