💾 iOS & iPadOS VPNs leak data, issue goes unfixed by Apple for over 2 years. Let’s see if the renewed public interest will do something this time…

💾 Just got my hands on a Brydge 11.0 Pro keyboard for my iPad. Bought a returned unit on discount, which adds to my satisfaction 🙂 First tweaks: 1️⃣ increased trackpad speed 2️⃣ enabled tap to click. Now going through the pain of getting used to it, hope I can adjust quickly.

💾 @help I noticed a minor bug with running category filters. It seems filters are applied to old versions of the posts. I expected it would be to the latest version only. So some posts got assigned to multiple categories. I filter by single emoji so it was easy to spot.

💾 I’ve been reading Hacker News for years filtering for points over 100. Happy to have found a way to replicate that with a feed. HN RSS is super handy, and has many options. Added bonus - fetching full content works better than with the official feed.

This post will be shortly sent to support@feedbin.com.

Here goes as per Feedbin’s feature request instructions:

1️⃣ Sell it! Why would this make a good feature?

Feedbin already has excellent Micro.blog integration! 🙏 With just a few bits of improvements, including this one, Feedbin can practically replace the native app. This makes it more likely for Feedbin to become the one place to consume content from.

The request is to add a direct link to the Micro blog converstion, alongside the Thread view. This feature would:

• make the UX more consistent with the Twitter integration
• eliminate friction by reducing app switching

2️⃣ Good features should appeal to many. Not just you.

Micro.blog is also a community formed around conversations. People interact daily on the platform. Some of us find a feed reader the best way to catch up with posts (see this post, and its conversation). Not all are Feedbin users, but those who are will love a better integration.

3️⃣ How do you envision the feature would work? Use descriptions, mock-ups whatever helps communicate your vision.

4️⃣ Most of the time the hardest part of any feature is building an interface for it, so extra points if you can help out with that.

Combining 3️⃣& 4️⃣. Let’s take a Twitter post example, as in the screenshot below.

The Micro.blog integration could work in similar fashion:

• Message bubble icon would open the Thread in Feedbin, as it works already now
• The service icon would open the external link to the conversation

5️⃣ Above all contributing code is the best way to get a feature started.

Sorry, no can do. 🙂

💾🎙 The Changelog Podcast #499: Long Live RSS! w/ Ben Ubois, maker of Feedbin and Airshow. On managing feed fatigue, a gripe with RSS, the solution discussed was to subscribe to less and quieter feeds. I was surprised the Mute feature of Feedbin was not brought up.

This post will be shortly sent to support@feedbin.com.

Not sure if this may be classified as an issue, but here goes as per Feedbin’s feature request instructions:

1️⃣ Sell it! Why would this make a good feature?

Feedbin already has excellent Micro.blog integration! 🙏 With just a few bits of improvements, including this one, Feedbin can practically replace the native app. This makes it more likely for Feedbin to become the one place to consume content from.

Showing images/thumbnails is fairly standard:

• helps to read micro posts faster, no need to even open the entry
• makes the list of entries prettier
• many other feeds, incl. 🐦 Twitter support image thumbnails

This request particularly refers to the Discover and Timeline type of feeds:

• https://micro.blog/posts/discover
• https://micro.blog/feeds/username.json, e.g. mine being https://micro.blog/feeds/todor.json

2️⃣ Good features should appeal to many. Not just you.

The Discover and personal Timeline feeds are the core feeds on Micro.blog. I bet users spent most of their time on these feeds. This feature will improve the experience for every Micro.blog user.

3️⃣ How do you envision the feature would work? Use descriptions, mock-ups whatever helps communicate your vision.

4️⃣ Most of the time the hardest part of any feature is building an interface for it, so extra points if you can help out with that.

Combining 3️⃣ & 4️⃣. The attached images show the difference between the Discover feed and the blog’s direct JSON feed. The thumbnail is showed in the blog’s feed.

The feature request is essentially to have the thumbnail visible for entries that utilize the Micro.blog integration as well.

Here is a gist with a snapshot of the Discover feed. Relevant part:

    {
      "id": "13176027",
      "content_html": "<p>Pitcher plant is thriving now that it’s getting much more water and humidity. 🪴</p>\n<img src=\"https://micro.blog/photos/1000x/https%3A%2F%2Fmicro.jagtalon.com%2Fuploads%2F2022%2Ff7a3e0e05e.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"600\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\">\n",
      "url": "https://micro.jagtalon.com/2022/07/22/pitcher-plant-is.html",
      "date_published": "2022-07-22T14:49:06+00:00",
      "author": {
        "name": "Jag Talon",
        "url": "https://jagtalon.com/",
        "avatar": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2022/100012.jpg",
        "_microblog": {
          "username": "jtalon"
        }
      },
      "_microblog": {
        "date_relative": "2022-07-22  2:49 pm",
        "date_timestamp": 1658501346,
        "is_favorite": false,
        "is_bookmark": false,
        "is_deletable": false,
        "is_conversation": false,
        "is_linkpost": false,
        "is_mention": false
      }
    },

5️⃣ Above all contributing code is the best way to get a feature started.

Sorry, no can do. 🙂

I’ve been rebuilding my RSS reader setup over the last few days and I’m loving it. I was an avid Google Reader user (RIP) back in the day. After its demise I switched over to newsletters, except for a minor flirt with Feedly. Newsletters hardly ever worked for me as I’m not email-oriented at all. Some posts on ✴️ Micro.blog inspired me to check again the state of RSS readers and I’m super excited about what I found. Nowadays, I would call them feed readers - there are more options than RSS and this is amazing - JSON, Atom, email (!), podcasts, and I suppose some custom integrations.

After exploring several options I settled for 🍔 Feedbin. NetNewsWire and Reeder, while refreshingly straightforward, felt insufficient for my needs. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the details anymore after so much digging and comparing. I may still return to them in the future. The last contender was Inoreader. It has a dazzling amount of options, so many as to confuse you in the beginning. Yet, most of the configurability was cruft to me, and the one thing I found useful for viewing didn’t have feature parity on iPad. I can’t stress how much it annoys me when the mobile apps are too crippled vs web.

Here’s a list of the top things I appreciated in 🍔 Feedbin, mixed with my workflow preferences:

• Aesthetics The app is sleek-looking and current. If I’m to stick with a reader, aesthetics are not a superficial requirement. I’m giving up the curated design of many services. I should like what I look at.
• Fetching full content Feeds are often truncated. 🍔 Feedbin does a stunning job at fetching the full content. It’s also a persistent setting per feed. So it works seamlessly. E.g. Inoreader required one extra click every time. Added bonus is how all the ads and useless elements get stripped away.
• Mute I’m an inbox 0 person. Unread counts stress me a lot. For the highest volume feeds, mainly news-type, I just mute the feeds. In any case, I read news on-demand even now. 🍔 Feedbin gives you stats for feed volume which simplifies managing this.
• Micro.blog integration This is very important to me currently. There is excellent integration - you can even read the whole conversation from within 🍔 Feedbin. One thing that is lacking is a direct link to the conversation for ease of replying. A feature request is on my list.
• 🍔 Feedbin is not after my data From what I can tell the app is maintained by a small team of 2. There is no magic algorithm, suggestions, ads, i.e. suspicious intelligence. Furthermore, the project is open source, though it’s not recommended to run your own instance. And even then, no one is stopping you - just don’t expect official support.

I’ve been steadily migrating what I follow from a zillion of places to the feed reader - email, bookmarks, Twitter, Medium. It’s been extremely smooth. Only in one case I needed to use a feed generator (FetchRSS), yet to see if this works well enough - but, hey, there is this option for stubborn sites, too.

That’s it for now. Hope someone found something useful. If you have any tips, hit me up 🙏

💾 @help [Feature request] Would be useful to have a link to the corresponding conversations from Posts and Replies. Similar to Mentions. It will make it easier to refer to related conversations in current and future discussions.

💾❓🍔 Feedbin + ✴️ Micro.blog query. There is already pretty nice integration. Only thing lacking is interaction. Is it possible to reply to a conversation directly from Feedbin? If not, is there an easy way to navigate to the conversation as to reply from Micro.blog?

💾 Found another use for my iPad - a power bank. Don’t have my iPhone’s power brick on me, but the USB-C Digital AV multiport adapter made it possible to charge my phone from the iPad. Pity the adapter is too smart to just work with the iPad’s power brick. 👨🏻‍🔧