Lately I’ve been trying to move away from the algorithm-based news and social media sources, and going back to a more self-curated presentation. For me, this means a lot of RSS feeds and podcasts. And I’ve found the RSS reader with the best combination of customization and usefulness is CommaFeed.

A surprising number of websites still offer RSS feeds of their content, including most major news sites, and even YouTube and Reddit. When I first set up my CommaFeed, I made the mistake of subscribing to like every RSS feed I could find, from sources like CNN, BGR and HuffPo, and I found a great site called ComicsRSS.com that provides rss feeds for hundreds of regular comic strips and webcomics. But dang, my ‘News Page’ became ridiculously overwhelming very quickly.

Unfortunately, one RSS feature that CommaFeed doesn’t do so well with are Podcasts. You can subscribe to them, sure, (and YouTube channels as well!) but it treats a podcast the same way as any other news article. Which means that you can’t really look at other news items while listening to an episode—once you click away to something else, playback stops and you have to go find the episode in your feed to start listening again (also it doesn’t remember your playback position, so you gotta start over and scrub back to where you left off). I get that it’s primarily a newsreader app, but I’m hoping to see more development in the podcast/media side of things.

I’ve also recently started trying to get filtering to work, but it’s a fairly non-intuitive process requiring regex code and convoluted logic structure. One of my subscriptions tends to do a lot of promoted posts, and articles promoting good deals on Amazon, so I’ve been trying to filter those out using the provided instructions. Even trying to filter for the specific ‘sponsored’ and ‘deals’ tags, though, doesn’t seem to exclude those posts at all, so I’m still subjected to them. The only saving grace there so far is CommaFeed’s built-in ‘Next’ article button that lets me just jump over it.

One thing I’m looking forward to digging into more is the custom CSS section, where you can literally break down the whole page and style all the elements to look however you like. I haven’t played with it much yet, but I’m definitely going to as I start making it part of my regular morning routine.

Still, despite its faults, I’ve been finding it a useful addition to my day, and I look forward to continuing to refine my experience with it over time. Also, it’s open-source, so who knows? Maybe I can try coding some of these features I’d like to see myself and submitting them for a future release?