WordPress Reader Is Criminally Under Marketed
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WordPress Reader Is Criminally Under Marketed
I must admit that I’ve known about Reader, which is the WordPress.com tool for following blogs, for years now, but never realised it worked for sites that were not hosted on WordPress infrastructure. It actually allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and import OPML files.
When you follow as many sites and blogs as I do, a good RSS Reader is the only way to fly.
I only discovered this functionality today when I decided to have a poke around after spying a post about a new feature called “Recommended Blogs”. It’s essentially a blogroll for your Reader profile.
Now I feel like a bit of an idiot for ignoring Reader for the past few years. Not only can I import all of my subscriptions from my current RSS reader, but I can easily reblog (republish or quote) parts of them on my own blog directly from within the interface, and can even write a post from within the feed.
I don’t have to switch to another service to find content to write about, and it’s all available on the web and in the Jetpack app on my phone.
I’m going to have to spend a few days actually using it as my main RSS reader to decide if the convenience is worth jumping ship for, but for now, I’m pretty impressed.
It needs a dark mode, though.
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WordPress Reader Is Criminally Under Marketed
I must admit that I’ve known about Reader, which is the WordPress.com tool for following blogs, for years now, but never realised it worked for sites that were not hosted on WordPress infrastructure. It actually allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and import OPML files.
When you follow as many sites and blogs as I do, a good RSS Reader is the only way to fly.
I only discovered this functionality today when I decided to have a poke around after spying a post about a new feature called “Recommended Blogs”. It’s essentially a blogroll for your Reader profile.
Now I feel like a bit of an idiot for ignoring Reader for the past few years. Not only can I import all of my subscriptions from my current RSS reader, but I can easily reblog (republish or quote) parts of them on my own blog directly from within the interface, and can even write a post from within the feed.
I don’t have to switch to another service to find content to write about, and it’s all available on the web and in the Jetpack app on my phone.
I’m going to have to spend a few days actually using it as my main RSS reader to decide if the convenience is worth jumping ship for, but for now, I’m pretty impressed.
It needs a dark mode, though.
but I see #ActivityPub as the evolution of RSS. we need readers with TTS that connect to our decentralized social graph. queue up what we've bookmarked in a mastodon app and what's most popular with the people we follow. let us boost from the app. etc.
I've switched to @wallabag post Pocket and love it but really wish it could do all that.
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but I see #ActivityPub as the evolution of RSS. we need readers with TTS that connect to our decentralized social graph. queue up what we've bookmarked in a mastodon app and what's most popular with the people we follow. let us boost from the app. etc.
I've switched to @wallabag post Pocket and love it but really wish it could do all that.
Not entirely sure about that William, at least for me. I’m more interested in content ingest.
I’m not a fan of “boosting”, “reposting”, or whatever each network calls it without additional steps. It’s actually one of the problems I see with social media in that it’s too easy to amplify content without adding anything (thought included) to the conversation.
I do agree that I would love to have a system whereby my social graph, and content is available for ingestion, and I can write about it and post to a blogging platform, or mastadon, all from the one place. That would be awesome :)
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Not entirely sure about that William, at least for me. I’m more interested in content ingest.
I’m not a fan of “boosting”, “reposting”, or whatever each network calls it without additional steps. It’s actually one of the problems I see with social media in that it’s too easy to amplify content without adding anything (thought included) to the conversation.
I do agree that I would love to have a system whereby my social graph, and content is available for ingestion, and I can write about it and post to a blogging platform, or mastadon, all from the one place. That would be awesome :)
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but how did you find out about that RSS feed etc?
imo the boost is what makes it social media. we decide together what deserves attention, without it ever being forced on us. we only see it if somebody we follow boosted it. virality based on consent.
the alternative is great stuff reaches a few very slowly while big media owners and advertisers dominate our public mind.
(I agree with not boosting it until you've actually read it etc.)
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@clayote I mean, there are still problems it can't solve, but that set is much smaller than you would think if you last looked at it seriously any time up until a few months ago. The models now can search the web, instrument software so they can test without human intervention, and plan quite large/complicated projects for implementation across several context windows.
When driven by an expert, there is very little it can't do, and it does it all very, very, rapidly.
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@clayote it is quite wrong, as of October of last year, when the current crop of models arrived. As of Opus 4.5, Codex 5.2, and Gemini 3, when used in an agentic context (e.g. Claude Code), they're not limited to simple/repetitive code or code that is prominent in the training data.
The training data is "the entire internet and all of public Github", so it knows every language, every framework. Yeah, it's better at simple CRUD apps in TypeScript, but it also kicks my ass in my best languages.
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@clayote @swelljoe I'd say that was true not that long ago, but not necessarily now. More likely to be true of those people who don't even look at the output, which I think is atrocious.
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@noplasticshower yeah, I'm confident that many, if not all, of the major models have ingested the thousands of posts I've made to the forum I maintain for the OSS projects I work on. I feel ambivalent about that. On one hand, if someone is asking ChatGPT for help with my software, I'd rather it give reasonable answers than dangerous ones.
But, also, it sucks that the way it does that kind of thing is DDoSing my websites periodically and blatantly disregarding copyright or licenses.
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@swelljoe As a non-user of AI (lucky), my impression was that in the areas it works well in -- repetitive codebases that resemble ones in the training dataset -- the productivity increase also incurs technical debt at a rate higher than if you'd gotten some junior coders to do it; is that wrong?
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@swelljoe I learned a weird thing about my stuff and Anthropic https://berryvilleiml.com/2025/12/05/the-anthropic-copyright-settlement-is-telling/
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@matt @swelljoe Yep. Yep. I got laid off because of #AI but I'm using it for lots of things these days. I tend to work slowly so I'm finding ways to leverage it to increase my productivity. The catch is figuring it out without reducing quality.
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Oh, also, I have skin in the game. I'm not just randomly dismissing the ethical concerns, I'm right in the middle of them.
A book I wrote was among those pirated by Anthropic. I'm getting ~$1500 (and my publisher is getting the other ~$1500) from the settlement. And, since I have a bunch of code in Open Source projects spanning decades, I'm sure my code is also in the training data for all of them.
I'm not ecstatic about it. But, it's where we are and I don't imagine I can do much about it.
