 Tom here from Lauren systems and one of the challenges in technology is keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of technology and That comes down to reading lots of new sites and people ask what sites do you read and let's get more specific about how I read those sites So if you just want to know what sites I read Hey, I've left a link down to a forum post where I have my list But I don't read them natively on their sites because the algorithms are Dominating them to try to push you towards clicking all the fancy shiny things on the site to sell more ads and that can be a distraction from what you came there to do and this is where an RSS reader comes in specifically today We're gonna talk about fresh RSS because it's my favorite RSS reader I started using it last year and I just can't say enough good things about how much better I am at organizing the news I've used RSS region to pass and I've kind of got away from them And I really made a commitment to stop going to it's not getting distracted by all these different sites and consolidate all these RSS feeds But it's more than RSS feeds. It'll actually do RSS Adam OPML HTML plus X path web scraping it'll even pull in YouTube feeds and it's mobile friendly So this is a pretty cool open source self hosted by the way application you can use to curate and minimize the distractions of all the different news articles that you want to keep up with So let's jump over and talk about it and speaking of distractions that running in the background happens to be a little Linux utility called Hollywood I think it's always fun. It's always a good conversation starter and it's easy to see how easily people are distracted So that's why I threw it up there for a discussion and topic, but leave your comments What you think of it down below? Let's start here at the manual Don't worry. I won't read it all to you But I want to talk about some of the features because maybe there's features in here that I don't use but maybe interesting to you So RSS and Adam aggregation mark article as favorite if you liked it and we want to read it later I do use that feature filter and search functionality helps easily find articles Now this is not full regex filtering that you can do but you can say I want to find articles of a certain title Across all the new sites that I've aggregated in here. So that's pretty cool Statistics neat if you're curious just how often articles have been posted in some of the publishing frequency of the website Import export themes available extensions by the community Google reader like API to connect Android applications I don't use this but I think it's kind of neat, but the interface itself is mobile friendly So I just view it on my phone logged in so not a problem there The application is responsive, which means small screens No problem as I said there and one of the other things is neat There's not only is this self-hosted and free But you actually have the ability to create an RSS feed out of all your aggregated RSS feed So if you wanted to pipe this in back to the API like connect option, you could actually feed this somewhere else as well Now they have documentation on it administration and getting it set up There's a couple different ways to set it up. I happen to run it in a docker They do not have their own official docker images, but the folks at Linux server.io do maintain this This was updated just two days ago they have installs for for through Docker CLI or through Docker compose and Also, I'm using it myself because true charts has a version of it and I just use the host path option I had mentioned this the other day in my video. So you can load this up through true charts You just point it to the host path that you would like and all of your data is saved right there So if you have to rebuild the application you just point it right back at this and it sets up again makes it easy to back up and restore on another NAS if That was something I needed to do. All right, let's take a look at the fresh RSS interface right now It says I have no articles. We can try to refresh to see if there's any more There's no beats to refresh because they're all refreshed This shows me the show on red and this would be show red articles and we can click these and for example If I had some on red articles, I could filter for only red only on red Or maybe I should say only articles that I've put a star on or only ones I haven't put a star on as and made it my favorite We also have this as a bookmark option to show articles based on a query So this would find any articles where in title equals Chrome and instantly find those So I can go back to even right here on August 18th of 2022 Google patches a Chrome zero day. So this is from threat post I can look at this article have some of the data from it go right to the article as needed and be able to see that an Insufficient flaw input flaw one of 11 patch and update this week now These are ways you can easily find if you're looking for something or a company name and have they appeared in the news before This is one of the reasons I keep so much of this news So when something happens currently, I can also go back historically and say was this company in there before and of course if I changed us to Last pass there's been a few articles about last pass dating back to December that are in here about them Now as far as customization goes you have these global options for display for reading for Archiving and even for sharing so we go here to the sharing for example I have it so I can share to Twitter or share to LinkedIn and if you want to add another sharing option Maybe I should put it in for mastodon. I can hit the plus and put the share name display share URL use hit submit and now that would be on the sharing options Where those sharing options show up is when you click on any one particular article We have the share option here Twitter and LinkedIn is primarily where I share things But you can customize those as needed back over to our mainstream here Anytime you're managing the news feeds we go to subscription management and we'll look at like bleeping computer I'm just putting their feed. It's bleeping computer comm slash feed pretty simple And when you added this I can customize and override any of these defaults if I have a specific setting I want for any of the customizations for any input source I have for RSS or web scraping Etc because it can also do HTML plus XPath web scraping now let's cancel this and look at something like the YouTube So if we go down here to things I have for YouTube and I have like Lawrence systems in here We can go and customize that one and we can see Lawrence systems It's got the channel ID and if you look it's got the full feed URL, but you don't have to know the feed URL This is not anything you have to Have any knowledge of when you're doing this matter of fact when we'll go back over here And we just want to add something new to the feed drop in the feed URL So my youtube.com slash at Lawrence systems I'm gonna put that in the YouTube category I've added it so we'll let me add it again So give an error, but it will do the smart thing and figure out that feed It takes this input and converts it it does the same thing for bleeping a Peter I just putting it slash feed it Understands and looks and goes, okay I found the RSS in here and I can pull that information and then aggregate it together now for each of these feeds Whether it's new sites you decide on each of them part right here We'll say manage whether or not you want these in the mainstream by default So I can have where I only show in a category or show in the mainstream The advantage to doing that is some things I don't want in my mainstream because that would be too much data But specifically with reddit, for example, I have homelab subreddits linux subreddits and support subreddits I don't always want these in my main But when I have the time I go through and see what things I haven't looked at that belong to these particular multi reddits And if we click on these and go to the manage these feeds, you'll see that there's simply reddit.com slash user warrant system slash m support and msupport.rss This is all you need and these are going to be linked down below in a forum post where if you want to see what multi reddits I have public basing and grouped so you can just pull these feeds in as well This allows me to pull them in and curate what I call my support subreddits and my linux subreddits and my homelab subreddits What this also allows you to do is as you add to these multi reddits And I put different things within them such as xcp and g ubiquity churnass pf sense pf blocker Bitwarden if I add another one of these in here to what I refer to as support subreddits Basically the topics I discuss and then I look for comments and interact with people in these forums This allows me to without updating fresh rss I just update these particular feeds and speaking of reddit your main page for reddit reddit.com slash press Slash rss you can get your own private listing feed now This is not something I include to the public but this is all my main Reddits that I subscribe to Curated and as I changed those once again, they're fed into fresh rss because the rss feed is always your current subscriptions You can also get more data in there if you want like anytime someone mentions you on reddit Self post replies only comment replies Etc and pull those into fresh rss as well Having all this data in one place makes it really convenient and one last part I'll talk about here is the social media I'm actually testing this out where you go and we'll manage this feed There's a free service right now. I say right now because twitter's a dynamic ever-moving target, but it's called nitter nitter.net And with nitter you're actually able to feed things from twitter As an rss so by doing this and saying look for tweets for tom lorenz tech my Public name and because my tweets are public you actually able to pull these in and get a list of the things I've tweeted without subscribing or having to log into twitter This is currently a service that has not been affected by changes at twitter So you're still able to pull certain people in there and it's nice if you just want to go I want to see a feed from a certain person But I don't want to deal with going to twitter where I see lots of dumb things that will distract me Doing this level of aggregation just really helps keep you focused Which is a challenging goal curating all the data around us into something that's more concise So I can look at it examine it learn about new things But also cut out all the extras that might be Distracting me on there someone probably pointed out, but tom don't you have a curated list of memes? I do have a guilty pleasure of looking at silly things on the internet that are curated on reddit So that is my thing that I will not put into my fresh rss fresh rss keeps me focused My meme list does not go in there because that's where I get distracted But by not going to the main page of reddit, I can pretend it's not there while I'm working and trying to aggregate data Nonetheless, let me know what you think of fresh rss Leave some comments down below what you like what you don't like if you have an rss reader you like even more Maybe I'm wrong about fresh rss about it being the best one because it's only the best one that I know about today One of you could leave a comment and I can learn about one that's even better And maybe I'll be reviewing that one at a later date than aggregating all the data, but for now this one's open source It's easy to host. It's easy to set up. It's got So many great features on it and I especially like the youtube one because you know Please like and subscribe and click that bell icon to get noticed of things and go ahead and throw your favorite creators url right into fresh rss and then have a nice list of all your YouTube creators and when they come out with new videos and don't have to be reliant on only youtube's That sometimes notifies you that you liked my content. So nonetheless, love hearing from you Head on my forums for a more in-depth discussion on this and other topics. Thanks