[JKCalhoun]

Awesome, I agree, personal blogs are great.

I can't help but notice all the blogs tagged "software" in the list (so far). In fact, I think if there was a filter to exclude software blogs, there might be only a few remaining?

I missed out on the whole RSS thing when it was popular. My sense was that it solved the problem of knowing when, among a whole bunch of blogs, a site had new content.

Perhaps it exists, I want an app/site that will scrape a list of sites I give it (blogs for example) to show me any new content each day. A personal home page with titles and perhaps a hundred or so words from each site I track that has new content.

In the broader picture, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of technology these days, spend too much of my time browsing, etc. (HN, case in point). So I am looking for something I call TRAoT, The Right Amount of Technology.

Maybe it's a "magic mirror" that displays this overview, home page. Interactivity is minimal or nil. No ability to comment, follow links, etc. Like the morning newspaper of old, I spend a little time in the morning with it and then go about my day "offline".

In short I am looking at ways to take the open-ended and stress inducing (anxiety inducing?) relationships I have with technology and replace them with a more staid, maybe even serendipitous, relationship that allows me back more free time, less stress.

Maybe this "Solar Punk" thing is something of the Zeitgeist of our time.

[fovc]

What you want is RSS, but you don't need to learn how it works at all. Go to feedly.com and create a (free) account. Add sites you want to follow (there's an 'add content' button which lets you search by URL). Done. Feedly will give you a home page with titles and blurbs, and for many sites you can even get the 'reader mode' content without navigating to the site directly.

[Not affiliated with feedly, just a happy user]

[tailspin2019]

I think it’s similar to Feedly but I’m a fan of feedbin.com

And for an iOS/Mac client I _highly_ recommend “Reeder”. [0]

Have used both for years now.

[0] https://reederapp.com

[lamontcg]

https://www.newsblur.com representin'

[tailspin2019]

Looks v interesting but could do with a mobile friendly website!

[kstrauser]

After a period of inactivity, NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com) is back as FOSS, and it's awesome.

[lanamo]

+ 1 for Reeder - great design!

[stereoradonc]

Have you tried Inoreader? cheaper and better than Feedly. I wasn't too happy with Feedly's UI and found it very confusing.

[pinkano]

What was confusing?

[WorldMaker]

In the Ancient Times there were a couple of different approaches to something similar to what you are asking for.

On the one side, for many years that was what people considered their "home page": you'd use a "Portal" like Yahoo! or MSN.com and they'd support all sorts of customization, including blocks for RSS feeds you'd give it. It's hard to imagine today's super-curated and overly news-obsessed Yahoo! or MSN.com being truly customizable and allowing you to pick and choose RSS feeds over media conglomerate content, but Yahoo! has fallen quite far from its peak and MSN.com and others were always flirting with the media conglomerates over user interests.

The other thing that existed in the Ancient Times that even fewer remember today was that HP believed RSS feeds actually could herald the "personal morning newspaper era" and that it would be great for printer and ink sales so they had an RSS reader for years that you'd give it a list of RSS feeds and a print schedule and it would happily have your "morning newspaper" printed and waiting for you.

It was an interesting idea, though I still don't think the waste of paper/ink on that was necessarily the best idea for the planet, but there was some romance to the concept of a "personalized morning newspaper".

Most e-readers have an RSS app or three, some with strong offline support. You might be able to get what you want from the right app.

I've also seen some interesting DIY projects (mostly here on HN) of people taking big e-ink displays and building ambient personal news surfaces. Nothing productized yet, but very cool to see people DIY exploring the "magic mirror" spaces for non-interactive "here's a glance at stuff you care about" displays.

[gen220]

RSS is still popular[ly-supported]. It's not too late.

I felt exactly the way you did for a long time. Eventually, I decided to invest in setting up a more healthy and symmetric relationship with information, like you describe.

I realized RSS was the right tool for this goal. I'd definitely recommend trying this, even if you don't have the gall to self-host. It feels like I get three square meals a day, instead of injecting corn syrup every 15 minutes for 16 hours.

I chose to self-host my reader + data store, so that all of the data can live on my machine, and so I'm not dependent on some VC, advertising, or goodwill-backed project that will kick the can in a few years. There are plenty of good options. I decided to try out miniflux [1] as a first pass because I liked it's dependency graph, and haven't felt the need to try anything else.

Most blogging platforms (blogger, squarespace, wordpress, substack) produce RSS feeds by default. News aggregators like HN and Reddit have robust APIs for generating RSS feeds.

There are products like you describe, that convert a web page into an RSS feed with various hacks. IMO, this creates too big of a dependency on a flaky third-party. It might (literally!) be easier to build+maintain it yourself for the few sites that don't have an RSS feed, with `curl` `echo` and `sed`.

[1]: https://github.com/miniflux/v2

[benrapscallion]

Squarespace pages don’t always have a feed, unfortunately

[gego]

RSS is the best! I use tinytinyrss to have my news in a way I want them, as we all should ;)

[cubano]

Sounds pretty close to RSS to me...what do you see as the difference between what you envision and existing RSS?

[JKCalhoun]

I honestly don't understand, haven't learned RSS.

[CarelessExpert]

Honestly, it's not that complicated. The site publishes a feed, and you can use any RSS reader to consume that feed. Some readers are out in the cloud, others are self-hosted as services, yet others are client-side applications.

In general, most blogs and major news sources, along with aggregators like Reddit and Hacker News, publish RSS feeds. It's basically the way I consume content on the web.

If you want to give it a try I'd recommend Feedly.

[1000mH]

I had similar wants as you and settled on the web extension fraidyc.at

I'm satisfied so far.

[SamBam]

> I can't help but notice all the blogs tagged "software" in the list (so far). In fact, I think if there was a filter to exclude software blogs, there might be only a few remaining?

Sort the table by Tags.

There are 9 non-software blogs out of ~250 blogs. So, yes, about 96% software.

[blakesterz]

I think what you want is a "Planet" set up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) or maybe something like River5? https://github.com/scripting/river5

[kixiQu]

I mean, it's building in "Hacker News Points" as a first-level primitive, so idk if they mind that software's the focus.

[DHPersonal]

If you’re on Apple products, go get NetNewsWire in the App Store and use your iCloud space to sync subscriptions between devices. You’ll have to manually add RSS feeds, but those are usually discoverable by doing a web search for your site + feed or rss, or by adding /feed or /rss to the end of the site URL to see if it’s hiding there.

[sneak]

Most websites that have RSS have a meta tag that identifies the RSS feed, you can just put the normal URL to the site/blog into your RSS reader and it will pick up the RSS feed URL from the meta tag.

[MattPalmer1086]

RSS still works fine for me. I use Feedly, but there are others.

[Rerarom]

Seconded, I use Feedly daily

[yetanother-1]

Inoreader is the closest to the Google Reader and the free account is really useful.

I like the app as well and it can scrap websites that don't even provide RSS feeds, given that they are scrabbable of course.

[stereoradonc]

Agreed. From a very happy Inoreader user!