Introducing RSS Support and Recommended Readers
With the release of MarkdownMaster CMS 5.0.3 which is the backend framework software being used to render the Veracious Network site, we can now support RSS for our posts and content, which means you can subscribe to view our content on a feed reader of your own choosing!
Just add our feed URL to your preferred feed reader to immediately subscribe to our posts to get updates.
https://www.veraciousnetwork.com/posts.rss
WTF are RSS and Feed Readers?
Long before the days of AI-powered social feeds shoving controversial but grossly irrelevant content in your face in an endlessly scrolling feed of depression and anxiety, users of the internet had to actually find content which they wanted to consume. Once located, manual bookmarks to that resource were required to remind you of where that content was located, and users were expected to actually visit that site to check for new content and read updates.
To simplify aggregation of these updates from various sites, a standard was devised and published by a few folks over at Netscape that leveraged existing technologies to allow client applications to retrieve articles via a standardized structure. Users could use local applications to subscribe to their favorite site feeds, allowing them to read articles in a central, standardized location regardless of the source. Those clever could even set their local applications to automatically download music or even VIDEOS at night while they weren't using their computers, allowing that content to be immediately ready in the morning while they enjoy their coffee!
(Sarcasm today with ultra-wide 64k HD 3D videos available immediately streamed on demand from strictly controlled DRM-infested software, but back in the early 2000's it took a while to download even a single 3 minute song, so rich media often had to be queued to be downloaded when bandwidth was available.)
This is Ancient Tech, We Don't Need This Now
This is ancient tech, predating even some of our readers, (which is a scary thought to some of us). It can be argued however that in an era of ever-invasive DRM restricting what users can and cannot do and "AI"s (or A-One's as some folks call them evidently) with their dubiously-obtained LLMs endlessly shoving virtual slop into our ocular receptors, that these simple, open, cross platform, cross application, and human-centric technologies are even more important now than ever.
The content on our site is our intellectual property, but how you, as the reader, choose to consume that media is entirely to your discretion. If you prefer to have an e-ink device download the content to give you something to read while out camping, GREAT! If you prefer to have a ticker in your terminal that streams headlines of your subscribed feeds, WONDERFUL!
Technology like RSS give flexibility and power back to the content consumer, not the content publisher.
Our Recommendations for Feed Readers
Lastly now that the brief history and obligatory rant is over, here is a list of a few RSS feed readers which we have found which work pretty well, and best of all, are open source and free.
NetNewsWire for Apple MacOS and iOS
Screenshot of NetNewsWire from https://netnewswire.com/screenshots.html
NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader for Mac, iPhones, and iPads. It supports a Safari extension to quickly subscribe to your favorite site, syncing with various platforms, folders, searching, and all the niceties one would expect from a feed reader.
Source code available on Github and licensed under MIT.
Download NetNewsWire on the App Store {.center}
Fluent Reader for Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, and iOS
Fluent Reader is a modern desktop RSS reader for just about every platform with support for article view or an embedded browser-rendered view of the original link.
Source code available on Github and licensed under BSD-3.
Download Fluent Reader for... Windows MacOS Android (paid) iOS (paid) Linux {.center}
RSSOwl for Linux, MacOS, and Windows
RSSOwl is an older, (now archived), Java application that lets you subscribe to all your news feeds and organize them the way you want with powerful search and filtering options.
Source code available on Github and licensed under EPL-1.0.
Download RSSOwl from Github {.center}