This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feeds Author : Remy van Elst Date : 22-12-2019 URL : https://raymii.org/s/articles/Tiny-Tiny-RSS-Readability-plaintext.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- Back in 2012, I already [wrote about Tiny Tiny RSS][1]. We're now almost eight years later and I still use TT-RSS as my main RSS reader. I'm following almost a thousand feeds (944) and it is my main way of reading and discovering stuff online. All those personal blogs that post once half a year, mainline tech news sites and a bunch more sites. Back in 2012 I had 300 feeds, used the Android app. Nowdays, more feeds, still use the android app, used an iPhone app for a while and the server that it runs on has been migrated and upgraded a few times.

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[As you might know][2], I also love [plain text][3]. It's the most universal storage format, both durable and small. I don't want your nicely designed website, I want your content. Even worse for Medium.com blogs, or other sites that interrupt you and are reader-hostile. Cookiewalls, newsletter modals, all those annoyances are not possible with plain text. Which is why on this site, every article is [available as plaintext][2] and also [via Gopher][4]. [Text News][5] is another example of me trying to make plaintext available to more people. I want to share my Tiny Tiny RSS setup with you, which uses the af_readability plugin. Combined with the Android app, I've got an ideal setup to read just the content. ### Readability Readability is a term used to describe software that extracts the main content from a website. It tries to find the text that is the "article" and ignores all other things like menu's, headers, comments and footers. I use it for [Text News][5] and tt-rss has a [plugin][6] as well. Or, multiple plugins, there is also FeedIron and a few other readability options. `af_readability` is built in and shippes with tt-rss and works good enough for me. Compare this, an article without the readability plugin: ![without-readability][7] with this: ![with-readability][8] The last screenshot has the readability plugin enabled. I don't have to leave the app to read the article, I'm not distracted by any web markup or annoyances, just the content I want. One annoyance is that you have to enable the plugin on a per-feed setting: ![settings][9] With almost a thousand feeds that is undoable. But, most feeds I read already have full text content in their feed, so not a big deal to manually enable it for a hundred feeds or so. Another benefit I get is that when I go offline, all the content is synced into the mobile app. This means that when I sync and are offline but want to read feeds, I don't have an incomplete feed that requires me to click trough to the website. [1]: /s/articles/Tiny-Tiny-RSS.html [2]: /s/blog/Site_Improvements_for_accessibility.html#toc_1 [3]: /s/software/totext.py-Convert_URL_or_RSS_feed_to_plaintext_with_readability.html [4]: /s/blog/Site_updates_raymii.org_now_on_gopher.html [5]: https://txtn.ws [6]: https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/src/master/plugins/af_readability [7]: /s/inc/img/rss-read1.png [8]: /s/inc/img/rss-read3.png [9]: /s/inc/img/rss-read2.png --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.