This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:

This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org:
---
Title : Tiny Tiny RSS + Readability == The best way to read RSS feeds
Author : Remy van Elst
Date : 22-12-2019
URL : https://raymii.org/s/articles/Tiny-Tiny-RSS-Readability-plaintext.html
Format : Markdown/HTML
---

Back in 2012, I already [wrote about Tiny Tiny RSS][1]. We're now almost eight
years later and I still use TT-RSS as my main RSS reader. I'm following almost
a thousand feeds (944) and it is my main way of reading and discovering stuff
online. All those personal blogs that post once half a year, mainline tech news
sites and a bunch more sites. Back in 2012 I had 300 feeds, used the Android app.
Nowdays, more feeds, still use the android app, used an iPhone app for a while
and the server that it runs on has been migrated and upgraded a few times.

 Recently I removed all Google Ads from this site due to their invasive tracking, as well as Google Analytics. Please, if you found this content useful, consider a small donation using any of the options below: <a href="https://leafnode.nl">I'm developing an open source monitoring app called Leaf Node Monitoring, for windows, linux & android. Go check it out!</a> <a href="https://github.com/sponsors/RaymiiOrg/">Consider sponsoring me on Github. It means the world to me if you show your appreciation and you'll help pay the server costs.</a> <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212">You can also sponsor me by getting a Digital Ocean VPS. With this referral link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days. </a> 

[As you might know][2], I also love [plain text][3]. It's the most universal
storage format, both durable and small. I don't want your nicely designed website,
I want your content. Even worse for Medium.com blogs, or other sites that interrupt
you and are reader-hostile. Cookiewalls, newsletter modals, all those annoyances
are not possible with plain text.

Which is why on this site, every article is [available as plaintext][2] and also
[via Gopher][4]. [Text News][5] is another example of me trying to make plaintext
available to more people.

I want to share my Tiny Tiny RSS setup with you, which uses the af_readability
plugin. Combined with the Android app, I've got an ideal setup to read just
the content.

### Readability

Readability is a term used to describe software that extracts the main content
from a website. It tries to find the text that is the "article" and ignores all
other things like menu's, headers, comments and footers. I use it for [Text News][5]
and tt-rss has a [plugin][6] as well. Or, multiple plugins, there is also FeedIron
and a few other readability options. `af_readability` is built in and shippes
with tt-rss and works good enough for me.

Compare this, an article without the readability plugin:

![without-readability][7]

with this:

![with-readability][8]

The last screenshot has the readability plugin enabled. I don't have to leave
the app to read the article, I'm not distracted by any web markup or annoyances,
just the content I want.

One annoyance is that you have to enable the plugin on a per-feed setting:

![settings][9]

With almost a thousand feeds that is undoable. But, most feeds I read already
have full text content in their feed, so not a big deal to manually enable it for
a hundred feeds or so.

Another benefit I get is that when I go offline, all the content is synced into
the mobile app. This means that when I sync and are offline but want to read feeds,
I don't have an incomplete feed that requires me to click trough to the website.

[1]: /s/articles/Tiny-Tiny-RSS.html
[2]: /s/blog/Site_Improvements_for_accessibility.html#toc_1
[3]: /s/software/totext.py-Convert_URL_or_RSS_feed_to_plaintext_with_readability.html
[4]: /s/blog/Site_updates_raymii.org_now_on_gopher.html
[5]: https://txtn.ws
[6]: https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/src/master/plugins/af_readability
[7]: /s/inc/img/rss-read1.png
[8]: /s/inc/img/rss-read3.png
[9]: /s/inc/img/rss-read2.png

---

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