I made the RSS service of my dreams (Birchfeed)

0:00 Hey everybody, and welcome back to Better Computer. My name is Matt, and today we're taking a look at Birchfeed, which is my new RSS app that is made by someone who loves RSS, who has used RSS every single day for the past 15 to 20 years, and just loves it. So, this is the web interface, and I'll start by just saying the main reason I wanted to build this is because I do not like the web interface for pretty much any of the apps out there that do RSS syncing.

0:28 I think they're fine. I think they're okay, but they're not exactly what I want. Now, what what do I want? I want the ability to very quickly interact with things. I want things to be quick. I want keyboard shortcuts. I want things like if I'm on the top one here, and I go up, I want to go up to the folder above, and it does that. so, there's lots of keyboard shortcuts here. I remind you of them when there's no article over here. You can also hit the question mark to pull them all up and see what's going on. There's a command bar, so you can do all sorts of common actions here.

0:59 Really nice. Really cool. works well. But, it's not just a web interface, and it works in a lot of the apps you may already use. So, for example, I have Reader Classic on my Mac, and here it is. Birchfeed is connected there. 76 unreads. If we go back to the web, 76 unreads. It all works lovely. it also works with Net NewsWire. You're going to see there it is again. 76 unreads. 76 unreads. It's the same account. so, basically, how do you set this up?

1:27 The wonderful thing about RSS is it's so old that it's actually built on some standards, and people just kind of use these standards going forward. So, it's not just the RSS standard. It's also the reader kind of interaction level that's standardized around Google Reader, Fresh RSS, and Fever actually to an extent. And so, if you go into settings, you can go to your API keys page, and you can connect an app. So, I have basically shown onboarding instructions for Reader Classic, Net NewsWire, and Unread, all of which work.

1:58 Unread actually uses the Fever URL. But basically, these are going to have You need to give it a URL, a username, and then a key. So, how does that work? let's go to Reader just to see how the setup works. If we go into settings, we go down here to add an account. You're going to see all of these services, but then they have a self-hosted section, Fresh RSS, Reader, and Fever. So, actually all three of these would work. but let's just do Google Reader, for example. Server, email, password. if we have this, server, username, password. So, maybe I should change that to say email, cuz that's what un- or what Reader Classic has. But yeah, basically, you just do this, you create the key, and there you go, Reader Classic five, and the key is here. It's never going to show it to you again for security reasons, because I never stored this raw key. I stored a hashed version of it, and so I can never get it again.

2:51 You are the only only one who has it. If you reload this page, you can't see it again. All you can do is rename this or revoke it, which I'll revoke it because I don't want you guys using my key. but yeah, so you can connect it to a lot of the apps that already work, already are lovely. I use this mostly with the Reader Classic myself. so, if you like your RSS reader, you can probably keep your RSS reader.

3:13 But again, the web interface, much nicer. So, if you're using it on a computer where you can't install an app, it's going to be a nice interface here. There's also a couple unique things that I've added. Number one is basically, we have a news stream. So, if you hit that, it's going to open a new tab, and let's go ahead and pull this into its own window. And the idea of this is that you can just put it wherever you want. You can put it in a corner, you can put it in the background, you can put it on a second monitor, put it on your iPad, whatever, and it'll just sit there. And as it as news comes in through the day, it'll just automatically animate new things into the top of the feed, and you can see what's going on. This would be useful maybe while a big Apple event is going on, for example, and you can just see what's going on, what people are posting about in the community. You just saw one pop in right there in real time.

4:02 so, yeah. That's what's going on there. Really nice feature. You can switch it to look at just specific folders or all your feeds if you want. So, the new stream, really cool idea that I was really I really enjoy using. Another one is the daily briefing. So, RSS can be a lot, especially if you subscribe to a lot of feeds. It's a lot to catch up on and you may not be a completionist, and that's fine. so, the daily briefing tries to help you here. The big thing it helps me with is at the end of the day, I would like to have an idea of what happened throughout the work day because when I'm working, I don't have time to check the news most of the time. I'm barely checking in on my social stuff during the day. I certainly don't have time to check all of my RSS feeds.

4:45 And so, we have the daily briefing. Now, you can see it in the browser at any point, and you can see what your most recent one was. and you can basically see that this was delivered on Sunday at 4:09 p.m. And we've got some news stories here with links to the stories that happened, and then some smaller things here that I can check out. But, what it what it what actually is this? What's the actual use case here?

5:06 So, let's go to settings. Let's go to our email section. And you can see there's two emails. There's a weekly summary. This will be on by default, so you can turn it off. Basically, just tells you all the activity on your account for the past week. Delivers every Saturday morning. But, the daily briefing is the really cool one. Because basically, you tell it what time do you want to receive the email, and how long do you want that email to look back? So, you can do 6, 8, 12, or 24 hours. And you can do that to basically say, "At this time, I want you to look back this far and summarize what were the big stories that happened, what do you think I'd like to see?" And you get that in an email that looks very much like what we just looked at. Let me pull that up, actually.

5:47 Here it is. So, there here's that same thing in my inbox from yesterday at 4:09 p.m. showing the exact same content and I can go ahead and check that out whenever I want. so, really really nice. I have it show me at the end of the day. So, when I got off work, I can see everything that happened quickly before I jump into the details. And you could do it as a morning briefing to see what happened overnight. You could set it so that you never really have to look at your feeds.

6:12 You just set it to go once a day and look back 24 hours and then you have everything that happened. and you know, do whatever works for you. but those are really cool thing. you can only get one per day. There is some real cost to me generating these. So, I have to kind of limit it. But pick the time of day and the look back that works for you and it's going to be something that I think you really really like.

6:33 Another thing that's cool is automations. So, automations are great with these sorts of things. You can see I have two automations set up right now for demo purposes. I one called me and I one called sponsored filter. And basically, this first one is saying that in all feeds when anywhere has Birchler or Birch Tree, email me. And so, if I click into this, you can see there's a basic rule system that says in all feeds, in specific feeds, or in a folder, when any or all of these things happen. So, anywhere in the article, the title, article, or author.

7:07 if any of those are true, I want you to email me, star it, or mark as read. You can do multiple if you'd prefer. but yeah, so this is one of them. So, like if anyone mentions me or my website, I want you to email me. and for sponsored filter, if the title has the word sponsor in it, I want you to mark it as read. you could also do things like starring things automatically based on the text that's in there. You could make it so that if you have a publication that you don't particularly love everything they write, but you love one of their writers, you can have it email you when that writer post something. So, you can figure things out and automate stuff to your heart's content.

7:44 There's also newsletter support. So, you can set up a new you can set up newsletters to deliver here. you got a unique email address. You can regenerate it at any point if you want. but yeah, basically, subscribe to things with this email address and they will show up as a feed under a newsletter section in the app. there is also the ability to share quickly to Quick Reads. Now, this admittedly, I know is a thing I'll need to expand to other things, but let's say I've got this Verge article up, save to Quick Reads. There's a button here. I can also hit the keyboard shortcut Q to save quickly. I should also mention if you're using something like Reader Classic or not NewsWire or whatever, those apps have sharing options built in. Those will just work. but in the web interface, I have quick access to save to Quick Reads.

8:34 How it works is pretty simple. you go to sharing and again, there's only one option right now. I'm already connected to Quick Reads, but let's disconnect for sake of example. And so, if I wanted to connect, I can either use an API key or I can just click it. If I'm signed in, I can go ahead and say, "Yep, connect it." And now it's connected. So, super simple to connect to Quick Reads if you're a Quick Reads user as well. If you are a Quick Reads user as well, thank you very much. I hope you're enjoying it.

9:00 The last thing I want to show is full text RSS. So, one of the issues you may have with RSS is that a lot of websites will do truncated feeds. And I get why they do this, whatever. It's it is what it is. but it's nice to get the full text sometimes. And so, let's just go to a MacRumors article. They don't do this, so it's not going to be the best demo. I actually don't know have one off the top of my head that does this. But, if I wanted to make sure I had the full article, there's a full article button.

9:29 It fetches it. It makes sure it gets it and this should look the same. so, there's that. but some feeds don't do that. You may know Polygon doesn't do that, right? And yet, when I pull this up, here's the full article. Or The Hollywood Reporter doesn't do that, and here's the full article. And how does this work? So, basically, if we go back to the MacRumors feed, go into the feed settings, and you can ask for full articles. Now, this is the thing I'm trying to monitor and see what the usage is like, and make sure I'm doing it right and not it it's going to deliver the right results. But basically, when you ask for full articles, this is going to send a trigger to me. I'm going to double-check the feed, make sure the full articles functions correctly on that site, and that I think it's a good place to do it.

10:11 And if so, I'll enable it, and that'll enable it for everybody. So, a lot of you, once this really gets going, and a lot of people have started using the service, and we've kind of set this up for all the feeds that can benefit from it, you should be able to add these feeds, and they'll just magically return the full text. if they are truncated feeds, you can always, make a request to have it added to the list of URLs that will automatically get the full text. and yeah, ideally it'll be added. So, that is Birchfeed. I didn't talk about pricing. let's go ahead and do that. so, if we go to birchfeed.app in a private window, so that it doesn't log me in.

10:56 Basically, all the way down here, there's a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed for that. Just sign in, with whatever accounts you want, use it for 14 days, see if it works for you. If it doesn't, then no hard feelings. If it does, you can sign up. There is a subscription per year. So, just, you pay for 1 year at a time. For the month of September, during launch, it's going to be $29 for the first year, and you're going to get a discounted rate every year after that.

11:22 As of now, it's going to be $29 per year. and then, starting October 1st, the standard pricing will go into effect, which is 39 bucks per year. It's not that much in the grand scheme of things I don't think if you're into this sort of thing, but yeah, this is what I built. This is what I hope you enjoy. And yeah, link in the description to try it out today. If you have any issues by the way, go to the settings and there is a contact support thing. You can send a message very quickly to me and it will I'll try to resolve these things as quickly as humanly possible. For example, if a feed isn't loading that should and you think that's wrong, then let me look into it because RSS feeds can be a little funky because sometimes they are broken, but you kind of need to account for that.

12:07 So, most things should work. If they don't, shoot me a message. But that's it for me today. Thank you so much for watching. Bye-bye.