RSS. Nothing more, nothing less.

Feedgrab is a beautiful, simple RSS reader for calm and peaceful reading. Sign up for free today!

https://feedgrab.net

🧹 Sweeping articles under the carpet

I don't know about you, but when I'm scrolling Feedgrab on my iPhone there are often articles that I know I want to skip before I've even read the article. To mark these articles as read, I have to click on the article to view it, then go back to my list. This is not a massive PITA, but it's definitely a small one. So I've made a change to improve matters.

Now when you're viewing Feedgrab on your phone or tablet, you can quickly swipe left on an article in your feed list to mark it as read (or mark as unread if you're viewing your list of read articles).

Here's what it looks like in action.

Swipe left to mark an article as read

You can also use this swiping technique to move to the next/previous articles when viewing an article. This isn't quite as slick as it could be visually, but it's functional and hopefully feels a bit more intuitive.

Swipe left to read the next unread. Swipe right to read the previous unread (if there is one)

This feature is freshly baked in Feedgrab's AI developer warehouse, so there may be a few 🐛🦟 in there. If you spot anything weird, drop me an email and I'll try and get it fixed it.

Feedgrab has undergone some upgrades behind the scenes this weekend to keep it up to date with the latest libraries and whatnot. I found a few gremlins and I've sent them packing, but there may still be a few hiding in the dark corners. If you spot any issues when browsing your feeds, drop me an email and I'll try and sort it out.

Happy reading!

A few feed delays

I noticed that feed refreshing was backing up a bit over the last week so it's quite likely there will have been a delay with some of your articles appearing. Sorry about this!

I'm hoping the cause of this has been addressed so it should be much less likely to happen again in the future. Do drop me an email if you experience any issues.

📺 Feedgrab now supports YouTube!

Feedgrab now supports YouTube's flavour of RSS, so you can subscribe to your favourite broadcasters directly in Feedgrab! A much calmer way to get your content.

⊹╰(⌣ʟ⌣)╯⊹

Let's have a look at how this works. One of my favourite YouTube channels is from photographer Allan Schaller. Here's his channel page:

If you're using the Feedgrab Chrome or Firefox extension, you should see the badge to indicate it has found a feed – just click the icon to grab the feed! (Note: there's currently an issue preventing the Feedgrab overlay from working on YouTube, so you might not see the success message – just log into Feedgrab to check that it worked).

If you're using the Feedgrab UI, head to the new feed page and paste the channel URL:

The channel URL should be in the form https://www.youtube.com/@channel_name. Click subscribe and a second or two later you should see a success message with a link to view the feed. Click that and you should see the latest videos:

When you click through to view a video, you should see the YouTube video embedded directly in Feedgrab. Click to watch, or click the title to view it on YouTube.com.

This feature required quite a few changes so there may be the odd teething problem. If so, get in touch and I'll try and fix things up.

A new home for Feedgrab 🇫🇮

Feedgrab moved home this afternoon. It was previously sharing the same server as Pagecord in Germany, but today it has a server of its own, still with Hetzner but this time hosted in Helsinki, Finland! 🇫🇮

There's no specific reason for choosing Finland, other than I thought it sounded pretty cool as a location. Literally cool actually, given its far north location. According to a Hetzner press release, the Helsinki data centre also uses renewable energy to power and cool the data centre:

As with all of Hetzner’s locations, Data Center Park Helsinki uses cutting edge, innovative technology, and prides itself on the energy efficiency and high availability of its IT infrastructure. Plus, the company uses wind and hydro-based energy to power its entire Finnish operations.

There was a brief period of downtime while the database copied over but hopefully you won't have seen any disruption to your feeds and articles.

An update to Feedgrab's terms of service and privacy policy

A few small changes have been made to the Feedgrab privacy policy and terms of service. The main change is a notification explaining that inactive accounts will be deleted after six months. A separate blog post will follow.

You can see a diff of the changes below.

Privacy Policy

Terms of Service

Emergency plumbing work has been successful

Feedgrab jobs have been backing up over the last 24 hours resulting in a delay adding new articles. I've taken out the digital plunger and unblocked the plug hole so everything should be back to normal shortly 🪠

A small tweak to the ordering of read articles

Your unread articles in Feedgrab are listed reverse chronologically by publication date. To put it more simply: the newest unread articles are at the top. This makes total sense.

The list of read articles is also listed by reverse chronologically by publication date. This, to me at least, is rather confusing. When I look at my read articles, I actually want to view them by the date I read the article not by the publication date of the article. I want the articles I've read today to be listed at the top, regardless of when they were published because it will make them easier to find.

I've now put this change live. Your list of read articles will now have a different order, which is hopefully more useful. Do let me know what you think.

Pondering features

At some level Feedgrab is at 1.0, feature complete. For the most part it does what I set out for it to do. As a daily user there are some obvious improvements I’d quite like, such as auto-fetching the full article content when the RSS contains only an excerpt, or viewing feeds by most recently read, or swipe functionality on mobile (quickly dismissing articles, mainly). I’ll probably get around to these, but as a free (donationware - hint hint) app, I can’t commit too much time to it.

Other features on my mind are a new view for the main articles page that looks a bit more like a social media feed, and a weekly email digest for reminding you what you missed. The latter feels more like a ‘premium’ feature, but my recent experience of B2C software suggests that getting people to pay anything for an RSS reader in 2024 will be a stretch!

Quite a few people are using Feedgrab every day now, so if you’re reading this (you got automatically subscribed to this blog when you signed up, so hopefully you are!) then I’d love to know how you find it, what’s a bother, how I might think about monetising it, and what one thing would delight you if it was added.

The Feedgrab Firefox extension is here! 🦊

Feedgrab launched with a Chrome extension but Firefox users were out of luck. Well, not any more!

Today Mozilla approved the first version of the Feedgrab extension for Firefox! ✨

You install it from the Firefox add-ons marketplace. Once it's installed, pin the extension to your toolbar and that's it. Whenever you visit a website which has an RSS feed, a badge will appear on the icon – just click, and you'll be subscribed that site in Feedgrab!

If you were wondering when the Safari extension will arrive, don't hold your breath. Apple demand I pay $99 a year for the priviledge of publishing it. Given that Feedgrab is donationware, it's not viable right now. If donations pick up enough then I'll definitely consider it, but I need a big chunk of new users, and for most of those to become donors, before it makes sense. Sorry!

(You should use Firefox anyway, it's great!)

ooh.directory

Feedgrab now has some rudimentary discovery built in but I wanted to share a wonderful blog directory called ooh.directory that is lovingly curated by Phil Gyford.

ooh.directory has well over 2000 blogs on a broad range of topics from architecture to web development and everything in between. Each blog has its own info page, which includes a link to the RSS feed. If you're super-keen, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed for each blog category (or the whole of ooh.directory) and be notified in Feedgrab when new blogs are added.

Do check it out, I'm sure you'll find great new blogs to add to Feedgrab, and subscribing is particularly easy using our Chrome extension! Just visit the blog website and click the Feedgrab icon on your Chrome toolbar ✨

Making content discovery a breeze!

The reason I wanted to built Feedgrab was to make content discovery easier. Enjoyable even. There is so much great written content in the world, yet it's difficult to find. It shouldn't be this way, so today I've launched the first step in making content discovery easier in Feedgrab!

It's early days, and the feature still needs a lot of finessing, but I'm putting it out there early to see what people think. Click the new 'Discover' icon to be presented with a list of categories to explore (this will also be the first thing new users see on their home page when they log in for the first time):

This will display a list of recommend feeds which you can subscribe to in one click. Each category has several subcategories, and you can drill down into each of these by clicking the category name (Feedgrab automatically categorises feeds that you add).

It's not the most exhaustive list at the moment, just a selection of the most popular feeds and ones I think are particularly good. There are fewer than 200 discoverable feeds right now but more will be added over time as more and more people use Feedgrab.

Hopefully this will help you find great new content. Let me know what you think!

I’ve been working on adding a new “Discovery” feature and making it the centre of the Feedgrab onboarding experience. The design is kinda meh right now and I’ve also realised that only a subset of feeds should be “discoverable” at this stage. I need a lot more users to really get a handle on what’s popular or not. Once I’ve segmented the feeds, I’ll put the feature live for everyone. Keen to know whether it helps people genuinely discover new content that they’re interested in!

A small tweak to the Feedgrab UI today. When you’re scrolling down through your articles or feeds, you'll notice there’s no more annoying “Older” button to click to view the next page. You just keep scrolling and new stuff will appear by magic ✨

Categorising feeds for better discovery

My main goal before I can consider Feedgrab a v1.0 is adding discovery. I want new customers to be able to find great content to read as soon as they first log in. I also want “power” users who arrive with OPML file in hand to be able to easily discover new feeds to follow. This is a real problem with the web right now.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Today a new feature is arriving behind the scenes which is a step towards this goal: categories. This isn’t something customers need to worry about, it’s something I have AI robots working on while we’re not looking. They’re busy reading the articles and figuring out how to categorise them. It’s a nice arrangement.

With these categories in place, I can now move on to adding the first discovery features which will hopefully allow you to find great new content for the topics you’re most passionate about.

Before I do that though, I really need to work on the styling. That colour thing really isn’t working! 🫣