Rss on Janusworx

Moved From Reeder to Readkit

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:59:16 +0530

I used Reeder for reading all my RSS feeds ever since the app launched over fifteen years ago. RSS is how I keep up with everything in the world outside and having a pleasant reading experience is very important to me.

It no longer serves that need for me.
For a long time, the way the app worked aligned with the way I want to read. Earlier this year though, the developer decided to take the app in a different direction, with a different reading experience. The older app is still available as Reeder Classic, but only a few months of use have shown me that the app is basically abandoned. The attention to detail is obviously now being applied to the new app.

Enter ReadKit.
I had used it briefly during the Google Reader apocalypse when every feed reader was scrambling to find new backends to sync to. Reeder similarly had switched to local only mode and was taking a while before it supported other services.
ReadKit in the meanwhile already had support for Feedwrangler, and so I switched to it until Reeder came back to speed.

And I’ve switched to it for the foreseeable future.
It looks beautiful!
It does everything I want, shows everything the way and want and behaves just the way I want it to. The only knock I have against it, is that it does not feel as fluid as Reeder does. But that’s nothing compared to the constant launch and relauch dance, I have to do with Reeder nowadays. Consistency and stability matter a lot to me.
Even better, it syncs natively with Miniflux, the service I use to actually fetch and read RSS feeds on my Linux desktop. No more Google Reader API!

This is a list of all my categories (with one of them expanded, click for a larger view)

and this is a list of unread articles in a feed, alongside one that is open (once again, click to enlarge if you want to see details)

That gnawing feeling has now gone away from the back of my brain.
The experience of reading and catching up with the world is once again a glorious experience thanks to ReadKit.

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Notes Now Has No RSS Feed

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 16:34:20 +0530

Finally figured out how to disable RSS feeds on a post by post basis.

I needed to do this for my stream of consciousness / wip / progress notes in the Notes and Miscellanea section I did not want to disable the whole section, because some posts, I do want to leak out.

What it boiled down to was getting the RSS template to ignore sites with some parameter set in the front matter. Most posts on the web do a rss_disabled: true or something to that effect.

Joe Mooring over on the Hugo Discourse logically pointed out that I’d want such posts to be disabled in the sitemap as well, so I’d do well to just piggy back off of that.

So all I had to do was set the following in the my front matter

sitemap:
 disable: true

and then configure the embedded RSS template¹ to just range through pages that didn’t have that parameter set, like so …

{{- range where $pages "Sitemap.Disable" "ne" true }}

The original line would’ve been something like

{{- range $pages }}

You’ll need to create a new feed file by copying the contents of the embedded template to a file called rss.xml in the layouts/_default/ directory

Once that’s done, all should be hunky dory.
Posts with this frontmatter, will now no longer appear in RSS feeds or the sitemap.
To make things simpler, I edited this sections archetype, so that the next time I create a new Notes & Miscellenea post, all of this metadata is already set for me.

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

If you already have it defined in your theme, then override it. ↩︎

Huginn: Vive La Pratique Délibérée Avec Les Flux RSS

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:32:05 +0530

I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so.
All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue.

Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time.

One way I practice is to take something in French and read it slowly, looking up words and phrases and slowly building up the missing pieces.
And to do that, I need something in French. I stumbled across the France Pittoresque site and fell in love with it. French and History! Just my kind of site.

Being the lazy bum, that I am, I went looking for an RSS feed, so that I could read their daily article in Reeder.
And hit my first stumbling block.
The good folk at France Pittoresque, don’t provide a feed. Or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Even after looking and looking. And then looking some more.¹

You know where I’m going with this. This is a job for Huginn!

This is how the site looks today

click to embiggen.

And this little item is what I want to get, on a daily basis.

click to embiggen. Actually click any of them to embiggen!

So I whipped up this scenario.

It scrapes that little section I mentioned above and gets me the title, the url and the description of the article

And generates an RSS feed that I can then use in my feed reader!
The feed is normally at:
http://your-huginn-instance/users/[your-user-id-int]/web_requests/[agent-id-int]/some-'secret'-string.xml

It looks more complicated than it is. It’ll get generated the moment you create your agent. One advantage of using a vm is that my feed is accessible from any device.

You can find the scenario code here, if you want to play with it.

Huginn has proven invaluable when it comes to doing all the little things, that I’d rather not do :)
Merci beaucoup, Huginn!

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

You’re talking to a lazy bum here. So quite possible I overlooked something. ↩︎

What I Learned Today (8th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 20:20:06 +0530

Don’t know if it’s the gym or the regular work beat, but I seem to be waking up later and later everyday. I don’t know what to do about this. I feel a little anxious about not having enough hours in the day.

Python
#

Why use comprehensions? Because it reads better.
Like I advice the young ones in DPGLUG on writing.
Write short, choppy sentences.
They read better.
With my problem sets …
- I should stop trying to generalise in advance and solve the specific problem first.
- Read stuff carefully. Don’t do more than is necessary
- Solutions take time to understand too. Budget the time

Linux Mint
#

Nemo, the file browser in Linux Mint always opens the home directory, when I click on it and there’s no apparent way to change it to a preferred directory. I want it to always open Downloads

~~A little bit of web spelunking led to an acceptable work-around.~~
1. Change the command form nemo %U to nemo Downloads
  And that does it!

Update
#

2023-02-09: Does not work. Will look for some other approach. Right now, with the workaround it opens a Downloads window alongside any other folder I click on 😂

Hugo
#

Added a plain, hamburger menu to this blog, using Aditya’s helpful instructions over on the PaperMod Discord.
With all the extra nav items, I’ve added to the header the menu would overflow on my iPhone (and probably on other folks’ phones too). So if this page scooches narrow enough, it will change the links on top to a plain menu.

Huginn / RSS
#

I often have sites that have no RSS feeds, but they’re still interesting enough to me that I want to keep tabs on them for anything new.
While I wrote a tiny program to scrape and generate a custom RSS feed to get my Poetry fix, I needed something more robust, if I wanted to do this with lots of sites.
I realised that my Huggin instance could do that for me. Huginn is documented pretty well, that even a slowpoke like me, could figure out a fix for himself, inside an hour
I also learnt something fun. How do I choose a specific, nested, div on the page when all of them are similarly named? By using the power of XPath! I found it to be a more robust way of picking something from a web page, compared to its alternatives.
It’s also pretty easy to at least get a basic XPath selection. Just inspect your element in your browser’s web inspector and a right/context click should normally give you the option to copy a link as an XPath. Getting to an href link in the div I wanted, led to something like /html/body/div[1]/div[1]/div/div/div/main/div/div[1]/div/header/h2/a/@href and BAM! I got the link!
This solves a really big problem for me. So once again, I’m pretty chuffed today as well :)

Urdu
#

Got done with the “siin” group of letters today.
It is getting more and more confusing to read, but I’m sure I’ll slowly get over it with practice.

Physical Fitness
#

More Cardio today
I’ve gotten comfortable doing an hour of active cardio at around 160, without worrying that my heart would burst. Now to focus on doing the same hour at a slower heart rate, over time.
The pain’s almost gone. Let’s see what the coming days hold.

Rss on Janusworx

Moved From Reeder to Readkit

Notes Now Has No RSS Feed

Huginn: Vive La Pratique Délibérée Avec Les Flux RSS

What I Learned Today (8th of February, 2023)

Python #

Linux Mint #

Update #

Hugo #

Huginn / RSS #

Urdu #