Detailed Notes
This is a tutorial and overview for the RSS Reader and Promoter (reader.rb-sns.com) site. Our goal was to provide an easy way to read and share articles. You can schedule posts for social media sites and easily keep up with all of the latest news. While we have started a list of RSS feeds for your use, you can easily add any others to the list, and they will be shared with other users. However, you will be able to keep track of which article you have read or shared.
A Repository of Articles When we grab the articles for a feed, we store as much of the original content as possible. Therefore, you can refer to posts made years ago and long after a site has ceased to exist. The Internet can often feel like shifting sand. One of our goals is to make it a little more firm and useful for discussions.
Users can share articles and add comments around the post (limited to the social site features) and see both the original content and their share comments.
Getting Started It is (currently) free and easy to get started. Just register an account on reader.rb-sns.com. Then click on the "Subscribe to New Feed" button on the home page. You can add a new feed or select one that someone else has created. You should see posts for a brand new feed appear within a day. If not, please send an email to [email protected] so we can help get it live. Please note that some feeds provide limited article information, so you may not get as much as others.
Once you have subscribed to feeds, click on the Articles menu item. This will pull the most recent 100 unread articles matching your feed or across all subscribed feeds. You can mark an item as read or click on the read article or post article buttons to shift it to read status. We offer the full article content where possible. You can click on view original to go to the original site link (if still available).
Post Targets You can read articles almost immediately upon subscribing to feeds. However, if you want to share them, you need to set up targets for those shares. This is done on the post targets page. A button labeled "Create A New Target" takes you to link to your social sites. All you have to do to get started is pick a name for the target and select the social site.
An example would be to create a target for your personal Twitter feed. You can label it "Personal Twitter" and then select Twitter as the "lkpTarget." Once you save a target, click on edit to Authorize the target. That will take you through the site-specific steps to authorize RSS Reader to post to your feed or page.
Posting Articles When you post an article, you can add content to your post. This is entered in the description text field. Sites vary support for this, so test it out for your chosen targets. You can also add an image URL for sites that support that. Currently, we have limited image support. Select a target site you have configured (via Post Targets) and set a time to post it. You can set up time slots for scheduled posts to ease your administration of regular content flow.
Once you post the item, it can be viewed via the Articles view activity filter or "My Schedule" menu item. You can post and duplicate to quickly post to one target and then select a second target or time to post the article.
Scheduling Posts We do not have to post an article right away. We can set it to go out in the future. This is done by selecting the desired date and time on the post screen. You can streamline this process by going to the "Time Slots" page. Here you enter a day, time, and target site to give yourself some pre-built time slots throughout the week. These can be deleted if you want to change them around. These will show up in the slots selector on the "post" page to speed data entry for upcoming posts and avoid doing date arithmetic in your head.
Unused Articles Articles that have been marked read but never posted fall into the unused category. You can always run back through these for more content. Note that it pulls all articles, which can become a rather long list and take some time to retrieve. However, you can read or post articles from here and catch up on things you may have found uninteresting in the past.
Feel free to check back here regularly for updates and a FAQ as we get feedback on the RSS Reader and Promoter. You can also click on the contact form to send us ideas or bug reports. Enjoy!
Transcript Text
[Music] okay so presentation today is uh an app that's been talked about mentioned a couple of times over the last i have no idea how long now last year or two at least referring to it as the rss reader and promoter it's got two primary focuses uh it came out of an existing application that sort of did what i needed it was very helpful i enjoyed it while it lasted but then they changed up some stuff and all of the key features i wanted disappeared and so although it is a it's a little bit tedious as an application sometimes for me to have built it i figured you know what it's one now it's mine so i can sort do what i want with it i can add features as i need to improve as i need to and uh right now it's going to be it's available for anybody so if anybody else wants to take make use of it the more the merrier as you'll see it's one of these kinds of things that the more people use it the better it is for everybody so diving in uh i'm going to talk about why basically the why why did i build this thing in the first place why did it even you know come across my radar and then talk about using applications so getting started about posting content and reading articles adding news feeds and then using the scheduling feature so first and foremost like any good application or any project really is we need to talk about the why why would we do this why are we going to do this this was as i said is based on an existing product initially and there's and it's still out there this thing called buffer if you go to buffer.com i believe it is they do it's a social media management tool essentially and we've talked about it in the past i think we even did presentation on at some point we've done some articles there's some blog articles if you go out to develop an or that on buffer it is as those tools go it was one of the more cost effective it was cheaper for the most part than a lot of the tools didn't have as complex an environment it didn't have the kinds of things that i think you would need if you were feeling like a full-blown team of people dealing with your you know social media and stuff like that and and dozens of sites but it worked well for particularly like a solopreneur or if you wanted to do something where you you've got your own little blog site you've got a couple places that you want to promote it um and maybe you know a couple of more or less the more popular i guess well-known sites that you wanted to promote stuff to which was at the time it's like linkedin and facebook and twitter and they added instagram somewhere where along the way and there may have been one or two others but those you know really sort of the big you know call them the big names and the thing that i liked about it is that it had an ability for you to subscribe to a feed a news feed rss feed and you could see articles that were coming through and you could yeah it wasn't there were some it wasn't all you know sunshine and roses but you could read an article or at least get a sense of an article enough to then click on the link go read it and then come back and it allowed you to schedule posting that into multiple different uh social sites so you could share stuff is a great way to keep up with news that was out there in specific areas or on specific sites and to pull that stuff in and then to share it out to different places which we've talked about before is is great it's nice to have your own content but also if you've got a site that you're going to bring other people to unless you have a like a huge team like you're a newspaper equivalent or something like that then you want to mix in your uh your articles and your content with a lot of other stuff out there you know maybe a 40 60 or 30 70 split something like that where you you put some of your stuff in sort of almost sprinkle it in along with other sources to make it something useful for people to come to as a essentially a one-stop shop for maybe a particular topic or type of news and that's exactly how the big you know called the big sites like uh like maybe an ars technica or um if you think of like the huffington post for news or some of those kind of sites that are out there that you would know the name because that's just where a lot of people go and a lot of times you'll find out that those well those may have original content a lot of them they're almost like uh like the drudge report i think was one that i don't think he ever did or i assume he's still out there ever did original content it would just you know be a sort of a clearing house in a sense for uh other articles and that's not a bad way to do if you can add that kind of information in it can help support your uh whatever your topics are and your positions are you know within those topics so this was awesome i love the ability for it to uh it provided me a way to have multiple feeds as opposed to having to jump to a bunch of different websites or have a bunch of links i click on one place where i can see articles i can scan through them fairly quickly read them find the ones that i like comment on them share them things like that so that was that was huge and of course the ability to schedule for the future so it was it's one thing to be able to sit there you know hang out on a sunday afternoon and read some articles and just sort of mark things and say yep i'd like to share this share this year the share that share this versus having a way to actually push those into things maybe for the week ahead so that you can share those out and have people that follow your your whatever your social site is you know like your twitter or something like that they can see articles and that you're you're pushing those out on a regular basis as opposed to you know sort of spamming 40 articles and two minutes and then they don't hear from you another for another week and that also works particularly if you're doing you know blog articles and stuff like that where you may post stuff out and you want to release them on a regular schedule then you can schedule that through that tool so getting started you can register an account it's free there's there's no fee for it or anything like it that at this point there's currently no uh there's no monetization plan for it uh maybe at some point it'll get big enough that that'll something will have to happen but i'll cross that bridge when i come to it um i'm not looking to do any particularly large advertising for it or anything like that so it'll just we'll just see where it goes if i suddenly have tons and tons of people we make some adjustments but until then uh it's it's sort of built to support as many people as we need it to as long as they're not you know we don't have thousands of simultaneous users um so we're gonna come in and register an account and once you get in you can either create feeds or select feeds that you want to have as you essentially subscribe to that will be this will start feeding the articles into your account and if it's an existing feed you may already have articles like right away otherwise it runs about every two hours it'll go hit sites and and pull the latest articles and so you'll see refreshes regularly and then right now it's just limited so it just because it can take a while to pull depending on what your what sites you have on your feed uh for example uh dev uh d zone developer zone i think they they put out a lot they probably put at least 50 to 100 articles a day out so if you spend a week without them you're going to see you know hundreds of articles and it can get pretty long just to have a pulse i just limit to 100 a time and then you can refresh it so you can you can process 100 and then refresh and you'll get 100 more if you've got a hundred more in your your various queues and this first part i talked about just basically you know getting in taking a look at articles um as far as just being able to mark them as red so they sort of drop off of your to-do list of course in reading and then as you'll note when you just read an article it's also behind the scenes it's going to mark it as read so you don't have to you know go back and do anything special with it we'll talk a little bit later about posting the article and then we also have where possible you can click a link to review the original so let's go look at this so this is at um i'll do it like this from the start and blow this well blow this up a little bit so it's uh and i'm logged in so if you go to uh and this is at reader.rb.sns.com if you do that and this happens just on sidenote because we've been through this lately this actually is a django python application and if you go in to reader.rbsnss then you can basically log in register with the site there's also just just as for usefulness there's just recent articles on various feeds that will show up uh just so you can and this is just for general if you wanted to just see what's out there uh so and you can see where it comes from so you can see like here's one from uh development or here's something off the new york times feed here's something from aws uh feed burner uh xkcd smashing magazine some of these things that are you know just kinds of stuff that you you may or may not see depending on what kind of feeds you normally take a look at and so registration is very simple i can just come in i can give it a username i'll give it an email i don't even know if i have this i'm just going to use this right now and we've got some basic uh password things so i'm gonna do let's see i gotta guess one that will work for this i think that'll work and then register okay let's just save that as new okay and so now i should be able to go in let's see uh what i call it hopefully i just created that oh no i might not let's go back in like that real quick uh let's just do this worst case there we go okay so now let me log in there we go okay so once you come in then um you're gonna get like right now i have zero feeds and this again shows just some recent articles that are out there uh much like the home page so even if you log in you can see sort of stuff that are this is across all feeds not necessarily feeds that you subscribe to feeds you subscribe to we'll see here in a second would be in articles and i have no feeds so i'm not going to see any articles but if i want to subscribe to a feed i can either pick and there's just a list of stuff that's somewhere in the system so i can pick a couple so let me just say i want to subscribe to new york times rs technica and developer newer because they're all awesome i can also create one if i want i give it a name and a description and i can pull a image file if i want to that'll and i'll show you what those look like in a second you know that's going to be a logo and then the rss feed link and it'll try to pull articles and so periodically i'll be looking at these as we get new feeds which is sort of a bonus is that as you add a feed that's going to be available to everybody else so as i've been testing out feeds and just randomly trying to find stuff on different content and different uh areas those show up so even though this chara this user is brand new all of the existing feeds are out there uh which also means it would be a way for you to advertise your feed to other users if like you know like for example rv consulting home page so now that i've got these uh that i've subscribed to now i'm going to see that i've got these three that are my subscribed to feeds i can unsubscribe if i want to i can jump right to the articles that have come in or i can go to here so now because i've subscribed to some i can see i've subscribed to all of these feeds i can right now by default i'm viewing all of them or i can pick one and you can see how many articles i've got for that one that are unread articles and that's one of the features of this is that this goes back this stores articles as it goes so you may have stuff even though for example we subscribe today like let me go see let me go look at developer that's got some older stuff if i go all the way down at the bottom here i can see that this goes all the way back to like right now it's at least back to august 18 of 2020. so there's i can actually get it's almost like it actually serves as a repository for older um articles and and content that's out there as well so even though maybe for example the person that originally creates this feed has gone through and read stuff and marked for themselves marked an article read um it is not the same for everybody so anybody that comes in and subscribes could potentially have a backlog of thousands and thousands of articles that they could look through which if they wanted to they can you know select a feed and start working their way through it they can also just you know mark all of them as red and sort of start from any given point there'll probably be more to that in the future abilities to you know do a little more searches and filters but right now i've been trying to keep it pretty simple so as far as reading then you come in and if i hit articles um there we go so if i hit articles and i'm let's just say i'll go with view all right now so i can pick one and i can mark it as red which is just going to remove it so let's just go ahead and mark that one as red so that's just going to remove it from my list i've got a 199 articles left but actually that's out of what's there so now it's just tacked one to the end because it's going to take the first 100 unread across all of these different sites so now i could also so i can just mark it as red and just say fine i read it i can actually go to the original link which if it still exists because as i said some of these are older uh articles so they may have gotten removed so that even if that site may be dead uh if you've got a feed from you know maybe a couple years ago if i click on it it's going to open it up in um in my browser it's going to jump right into that now you may get some of these pay blocks and stuff like that and that is going to affect some of the readers so if i look at this article and actually read the article it hasn't been there wasn't really much that was pulled in because like new york times because it is a paywall you're only going to get a title so you would have to actually if you you know and a little bit of a you know sort of like a tickler kind of thing or a you know summary of the article so in this case i would have to have actually wanted to look at it because it's behind a paywall you know you're going to be limited to that this does not break that so there are going to be limitations to some of those but now if i go back to the articles i'm going to see that the thing about the iranian president i just did that's already been marked off because because i went to read article two viking burials we'll see if i come back here and i go back then uh refresh now it's already been marked as red and i can also see here so i can see unused articles so these are going to be things that i have marked as that have been marked as red for me that um i haven't used yet or actually i'm sorry this is just out of all articles uh articles that i haven't used so i can we'll talk about a little bit more when we get into posting you
Transcript Segments
[Music]
okay so presentation today is uh an app
that's been talked about mentioned a
couple of times over the last i have no
idea how long now last year or two at
least
referring to it as the rss reader and
promoter
it's got
two primary focuses
uh it came out of
an existing application that sort of did
what i needed it was very helpful i
enjoyed it while it lasted but then they
changed up some stuff and all of the key
features i wanted disappeared and so
although it is a
it's a little bit tedious as an
application sometimes for me to have
built it i figured you know what it's
one now it's mine so i can sort do what
i want with it i can add features as i
need to
improve as i need to and uh right now
it's going to be it's available for
anybody so if anybody else wants to
take make use of it
the more the merrier as you'll see it's
one of these kinds of things that the
more people use it the better it is for
everybody
so diving in uh i'm going to talk about
why basically the why why did i build
this thing in the first place why did it
even you know come across my radar and
then talk about using applications so
getting started about posting content
and reading
articles
adding news feeds and then
using the scheduling feature
so first and foremost like any good
application or any project really is we
need to talk about the why why would we
do this why are we going to do this
this was as i said is based on an
existing product initially
and there's and it's still out there
this thing called buffer if you go to
buffer.com i believe it is
they do
it's a social
media
management tool essentially
and we've talked about it in the past i
think we even did presentation on at
some point we've done some articles
there's some blog articles if you go out
to develop an or that on buffer
it is
as those tools go it was one of the more
cost effective it was cheaper for the
most part than a lot of the tools didn't
have
as
complex an environment it didn't have
the kinds of things that i think you
would need if you were feeling like a
full-blown team
of people dealing with your you know
social media and stuff like that and and
dozens of sites but
it worked well for particularly like a
solopreneur or if you wanted to do
something where you you've got your own
little blog site you've got a couple
places that you want to promote it
um and maybe you know a couple of
more or less the more popular i guess
well-known sites that you wanted to
promote stuff to which was
at the time it's like linkedin and
facebook and twitter and they added
instagram somewhere where along the way
and there may have been one or two
others but those you know really sort of
the big you know call them the big names
and the thing that i liked about it
is that it had an ability for you to
subscribe to a feed a news feed rss feed
and you could see articles that were
coming through and you could yeah it
wasn't
there were some
it wasn't all you know sunshine and
roses but you could read an article or
at least get a sense of an article
enough to then click on the link go read
it
and then
come back and it allowed you to schedule
posting that into
multiple different uh social sites so
you could share stuff is a great way
to
keep up with news that was out there in
specific areas or
on specific sites and to pull that stuff
in and then to share it out to different
places which we've talked about before
is is great it's nice to have your own
content
but also if you've got a site that
you're going to bring other people to
unless you have a
like a huge team
like you're a newspaper equivalent or
something like that
then you want to mix in your
uh your articles and your content with a
lot of other stuff out there you know
maybe a
40 60 or 30 70 split something like that
where you you put some of your stuff in
sort of almost sprinkle it in along with
other sources to make it something
useful for people to come to as a
essentially a one-stop shop for
maybe a particular topic or type of news
and that's exactly how the big you know
called the big sites like
uh like maybe an ars technica or
um if you think of like the
huffington post for news or some of
those kind of sites that are out there
that you would know the name because
that's just where a lot of people go
and a lot of times you'll find out that
those well those may have original
content a lot of them they're almost
like uh like the drudge report i think
was one that i don't think he ever did
or i assume he's still out there ever
did original content
it would just you know be a sort of a
clearing house in a sense for
uh other articles and that's not a bad
way to do if you can add that kind of
information in it can help support your
uh whatever your topics are and your
positions are you know within those
topics
so this was awesome i love the ability
for it
to
uh it provided me a way to have multiple
feeds
as opposed to having to jump to a bunch
of different websites or have a bunch of
links i click on
one place where i can see articles i can
scan through them fairly quickly read
them find the ones that i like comment
on them share them things like that
so that was that was huge and of course
the ability to schedule for the future
so it was it's one thing to be able to
sit there you know hang out on a sunday
afternoon and read some articles and
just sort of mark things and say yep i'd
like to share this share this year the
share that share this
versus having a way to actually
push those into
things maybe for the week ahead so that
you can share those out and have people
that follow your
your whatever your social site is you
know like your twitter or something like
that they can see articles and that
you're you're pushing those out on a
regular basis as opposed to
you know sort of spamming 40 articles
and two minutes and then they don't hear
from you another for another week
and that also works particularly if
you're doing
you know blog articles and stuff like
that where you may post stuff out and
you want to release them on a regular
schedule then you can
schedule that through that tool
so getting started
you can register an account it's free
there's there's no fee for it or
anything like it that at this point
there's currently no
uh there's no monetization plan for it
uh maybe at some point it'll get big
enough that that'll something will have
to happen but i'll cross that bridge
when i come to it
um i'm not looking to do any
particularly large advertising for it or
anything like that so it'll just we'll
just see where it goes
if i suddenly have tons and tons of
people we make some adjustments but
until then
uh it's it's sort of built to support
as many people as we need it to as long
as they're not you know we don't have
thousands of simultaneous users
um so we're gonna come in and register
an account
and once you get in you can either
create feeds or select feeds that you
want to have as
you essentially subscribe to that will
be this will start feeding the articles
into your account
and if it's an existing feed you may
already have articles like right away
otherwise it runs about every two hours
it'll go hit sites and and pull the
latest articles
and so you'll see refreshes regularly
and then right now it's just limited so
it just because it can take a while to
pull
depending on what your
what sites you have on your feed
uh for example uh dev uh d zone
developer zone i think they
they put out a lot they probably put at
least 50 to 100 articles a day out so if
you spend a week without them you're
going to see you know hundreds of
articles
and
it can get pretty long just to have a
pulse i just limit to 100 a time and
then you can refresh it so you can
you can process 100 and then refresh and
you'll get 100 more if you've got a
hundred more in your your various queues
and this first part i talked about just
basically you know getting in taking a
look at articles um as far as just being
able to mark them as red so they sort of
drop off of your
to-do list
of course in reading and then
as you'll note when you just read an
article it's also behind the scenes it's
going to mark it as read so you don't
have to you know go back and do anything
special with it we'll talk a little bit
later about posting the article
and then we also have
where possible
you can click a link to review the
original
so let's go look at this so this is at
um
i'll do it like this from the start and
blow this well blow this up a little bit
so it's uh and i'm logged in so if you
go to uh and this is at
reader.rb.sns.com
if you do that and this happens just on
sidenote because we've been through this
lately this actually is a django
python
application
and if you go in
to reader.rbsnss
then
you can basically log in register with
the site there's also just
just as for usefulness there's just
recent articles on various feeds that
will show up uh just so you can and this
is just for general if you wanted to
just see what's out there
uh so and you can see where it comes
from so you can see like here's one from
uh development or here's something off
the new york times feed here's something
from aws uh feed burner uh xkcd
smashing magazine some of these things
that are
you know just kinds of stuff that you
you may or may not see depending on what
kind of feeds you normally
take a look at
and so registration is very simple i can
just come in i can give it a
username i'll give it an email
i don't even know if i have this i'm
just going to use this right now
and we've got some basic
uh password things so i'm gonna do
let's see i gotta guess one that will
work for this
i think that'll work
and then register
okay
let's just save that as new
okay and so now i should be able to go
in let's see
uh
what i call it
hopefully i just created that
oh no i might not
let's go back in like that real quick
uh let's just do this
worst case
there we go okay
so now let me log in
there we go okay so
once you come in
then um you're gonna get like right now
i have zero feeds and this again shows
just some recent articles that are out
there
uh much like the home page so even if
you log in you can see sort of stuff
that are
this is across all feeds not necessarily
feeds that you subscribe to
feeds you subscribe to we'll see here in
a second would be in articles and i have
no feeds so i'm not going to see any
articles
but if i want to subscribe to a feed i
can either
pick and there's just a list of stuff
that's somewhere in the system
so i can pick a couple so let me just
say i want to subscribe to new york
times rs technica
and developer newer because they're all
awesome
i can also create one if i want i give
it a name
and a description
and i can pull a image file if i want to
that'll and i'll show you what those
look like in a second you know that's
going to be a logo and then the rss feed
link
and it'll try to pull articles and so
periodically i'll be looking at these as
we get new feeds which is sort of a
bonus
is that as you add a feed that's going
to be available to everybody else so as
i've been testing out feeds and just
randomly trying to find stuff on
different
content and different
uh areas
those show up so even though this chara
this user is brand new all of the
existing feeds are out there uh which
also means it would be a way for you to
advertise your feed to other users if
like you know like for example rv
consulting home page
so now that i've got these uh that i've
subscribed to
now i'm going to see that i've got these
three that are my subscribed to
feeds i can unsubscribe if i want to
i can jump right to the articles that
have come in
or
i can go to here so now
because i've subscribed to some i can
see i've subscribed to
all of these
feeds
i can right now by default i'm viewing
all of them or i can pick one and you
can see how many articles i've got
for that one that are unread articles
and that's one of the features of this
is that this goes back this stores
articles as it goes
so you may have stuff even though for
example we subscribe today
like let me go see let me go look at
developer that's got some older stuff if
i go all the way down at the bottom here
i can see that this goes all the way
back to like right now it's at least
back to august 18 of 2020. so there's
i can actually get it's almost like it
actually serves as a repository for
older
um
articles and and content that's out
there as well so even though
maybe for example
the person that originally creates this
feed has gone through and read stuff and
marked for themselves marked an article
read
um it is not the same for everybody so
anybody that comes in and subscribes
could potentially have a backlog of
thousands and thousands of articles that
they could look through
which if they wanted to they can you
know select a feed and start working
their way through it they can also just
you know mark all of them as red and
sort of start from any given point
there'll probably be more to that in the
future abilities to you know do a little
more searches and filters but right now
i've been trying to keep it pretty
simple
so as far as reading then you come in
and if i hit articles
um
there we go so if i hit articles and i'm
let's just say i'll go with view all
right now so i can pick one
and i can
mark it as red which is just going to
remove it so let's just
go ahead and mark that one as red so
that's just going to remove it from my
list
i've got a
199 articles left but actually that's
out of what's there so now it's just
tacked one to the end because it's going
to take the first 100 unread across
all of these
different sites
so now i could also so i can just mark
it as red and just say fine i read it i
can actually go to the original link
which if it still exists because as i
said some of these are older
uh
articles so they may have gotten removed
so that even if that site may be dead
uh if you've got a feed from you know
maybe a couple years ago if i click on
it it's going to open it up in
um
in my browser it's going to jump right
into that
now you may get some of these pay blocks
and stuff like that
and that is going to affect some of the
readers so if i look at
this article and actually read the
article
it hasn't been there wasn't really much
that was pulled in
because like new york times because it
is a paywall
you're only going to get a title so you
would have to actually if you you know
and a little bit of a
you know sort of like a tickler kind of
thing or
a you know summary of the article
so in this case i would have to have
actually wanted to look at it because
it's behind a paywall you know you're
going to be limited to that this does
not break that
so there are going to be limitations to
some of those but now if i go back to
the articles i'm going to see that the
thing about the iranian president i just
did that's already been marked off
because because
i went to read article two viking
burials we'll see if i come back here
and i go back
then
uh refresh
now it's already been marked as red and
i can also see here so i can see unused
articles so these are going to be things
that i have marked as that have been
marked as red for me
that um
i haven't used yet
or actually i'm sorry this is just out
of all articles uh articles that i
haven't used so i can we'll talk about a
little bit more when we get into posting
you