Please tell me how to organize feeds to make it convenient to read.
maybe there are examples?
I see that tt-rss provides: categories, tags, labels, scores, filters.
How can these tools be combined?
According to the answers on this forum, the fox and experienced participants prefer tags rather than categories, and the main feed is Fresh articles. I don’t really understand how they can do without categories.
Categories are for grouping feeds by subject, e.g. Programming, News, Social.
Tags describe the contents of an article. Some of them are assigned by the owner of the feed, others can be assigned by you. I use them to weed out articles of no interest, i.e. those about sports. I also have tags assigned by filters so that I know when an article triggered a filter.
Labels are all about visibility and ease of access. Labelled articles will stand out in the list and be grouped together in the navigation bar.
Scores coupled with Default view are for sinking uninteresting articles and floating interesting ones to the top. Have them assigned by filters.
Filters are at the center of the automation. Use them to find articles to be tagged, labelled, or scored.
The optimal combination of the above depends on your use case. Do you have a few select feeds that you read cover-to-cover, or a firehose of information from which you pick out useful bits?
Forget about the Fresh Articles for a moment. This is just a view of the most recent articles. Scores will work in any view provided you have the Default sorting on.
I wanted to ask how the author sees the interaction of these tools? it is possible I do not see a way because of my habits formed in other rss readers.
I don’t have a lot of feeds and I don’t even use categories, labels, etc.
I have some filters which are designed to mark as read articles that are sponsored (i.e. ads) based on keywords in the titles.
In a typical day I’m always in All Articles and simply keep an eye on the articles coming in; marking as read things I know I’m not interested in. When I have free time, I glance through All Articles and read the ones that are interesting.
There are some times when there’s a tech conference (CES, for example) which usually means a lot of sites are publishing similar content. Those days I actually click into individual feeds to read the articles that the site in question is good at covering (Apple-centric sites for Apple stuff, Windows-centric sites for Microsoft stuff, etc.).
If I had 300 some odd feeds I’d probably operate in a similar manner but use scoring to push up/down articles based on keywords.
As fox mentioned, there’s no real right or wrong way to use the software. It has plenty of options to suit a variety of use-cases. Experiment and find the way that works best for you.
Just an example from my setup. I consider myself a heavy user with 150+ feeds.
I have about 10 main categories which cover most topics and the same amount of labels with some of them overlapping the main categories.
Due to the high number of feeds I make heavy use of filters (20 main filters plus 10 for label assignments) to reduce the number of articles or modify their score (I often use the mobile app and don’t want to see some feeds in fresh with a lot of images).
Addtionally I rely on a bunch of custom plugins for various feeds (retrieving full article, additional tags, modifying content, etc.)
In what order do you view the articles?
First the fresh feed, then the labels, then the rest of the category?
The screenshot shows the labels: gaming, hardware, security.
Let’s take gaming.
Based on your experience, how would you advise setting a filter for this label?
based on the source url
based on tags
based on words in the article content
one filter with big regexp like rage|fps|rpg|id\s+software|...|F\.E\.A\.R\.|...|play\s*station|ps.?|xbox|...
several filters with categorized regexp?
Can you give any recommendations to make setting up filters more convenient?
It usually depends if I am browsing on mobile or desktop browser and the amount of fresh articles but most of the time I just skim the headlines in fresh and afterwards check the feeds which are excluded from fresh.
See the screenshot from my current Gaming label filter.
All articles from feed in the category games are always labeled gaming (duh)
For the rest I used some gaming related keywords/names and apply them to either all feeds or feeds/categories where they seem to fit best (Cooking & Baking are very unlikely to have any gaming related articles )
A bit of advice regarding the regex filters:
Put short words like rage always between word boundaries (\brage\b), otherwise it will also match words like garage, forage, etc.
Try to keep the entries short if possible as they become harder to read
Use an online validator like Regex101 for advanced expressions (I have also written a small script which retrieves the filter expressions from the databases and checks if they are valid as TT-RRS does no checks on them)
If you have any mark as read or delete filters put them first and stop processing if they match. No need to label articles you won’t see at all.
Not to beat a dead horse, but I got my stick out so…
If I want to be notified of new episodes of PBS shows…i.e. Nova, Nature, Frontline, etc, BUT I never ever ever want to see notifications of Jimmy Kimmel, The Voice, SNL, etc…
Shouldn’t I just be able to put Nova, Nature, Frontline, etc into a filter with Applied Action: Delete…and then check the boxes for Enabled, Match Any Rule, and Inverse Matching.
That should “delete” all the crap and only show me the PBS shows or am I all F’d Up???
Yes, this should be sufficient to filter out everything else.
But you should put all names you want to keep in single filter and leave “Match any rule” unchecked. Otherwise the first rule will very likely trigger and delete the rest of the articles you intend to keep.
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