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FeedThing is a web-based feed reader with an emphasis on simplicity and preventing information overload.

FeedThing can track the posts you have read in each feed and make sure you never miss a post, or it can act as a River of News aggregator. Or you can mix the two.

Reading Feeds

For tracked feeds, FeedThing does things a bit differently than most 3-pane aggregators in an effort to make catching-up with feeds natural and low-friction. Specifically:

  • There are only two panes - clicking on an unread feed loads all unread posts.
  • Feeds with no unread items are hidden by default so your feed list doesn't get overwhelming.
  • Unread posts are presented in chronological order so you can catch-up by reading downwards like a human being.
  • Reading a feed automatically marks all posts as read so it's low effort to declare unread-post bankruptcy and bring yourself up to date.

Adding Feeds

You can add feeds via the "Add Feed" menu item or with this bookmarklet.

Simply drag this button onto your bookmark bar: Subscribe in FeedThing

Find out more about bookmarklets

You should be able to subscribe from to any website with a feed with the the bookmarklet or by entering the page url into FeedThing. In some cases you may need to hunt for, and copy, the URL of the actual feed.

If you want to import your subscription list from another service, you can do that in the Add Feed page as well but importing feeds in OPML format.

Organising Feeds

From the "Manage Feeds" menu item, you can see details about all your subscriptions. Feeds can be put into folders e.g. by topic and both Feeds and Folders can be set to display as a River.

There is (deliberately) only one level of hierarchy. No folders inside folders.

As an example I have my FeedThing set up as follows:

  • Two River Folders - Fast Feeds (containing feeds from some very prolific bloggers such as kottke.org and waxy.org that I will never keep up with) and News (containing, well, news).
  • All my other feeds are at the root level, with the exception of one or two authors that write in multiple places. They get a folder each to group them, but not in river mode. I still read every post.

By default feeds be assigned the clever-clever name that is published in their RSS. You can override this to something memorable so that you know where posts from infrequently-updated feeds are actually from. Do this either in the Manage Feeds page or by clicking the settings button at the top of the reading pane when you load a feed.

Your River

No matter how you organise your feeds, you also have access to a River of all your subscribed feeds, regardless of how you organise them. You can even make this your default view in Settings if you are a river of news super-fan.

About

FeedThing is written by me, Gareth Simpson. You can keep up to date with it's development in a couple of ways.

FeedThing is open source and written in Python/Django.

If you want to run your own personal instance or contribute to a fix or feature check it out on Github.