Introducing Shacknews Reader for RSS feeds

Hey Shackers! Today, we are announcing a whole new way for you to interact with content from all around the Internet. Our Shacknews team does their very best to provide news coverage within our coverage space, which includes video games, cutting edge technology, tabletop gaming, space exploration, and even electric vehicles. While all of our articles are great, there are a lot of other great people and outlets in the world who are creating content every day. We are launching Shacknews Reader to make it easier to consume and share whatever your heart desires.

Shacknews Reader builds off of a lot of what we learned from the Shacknews Cortex launch from last year. Sure, user-generated content can be great sometimes, but some of the design aspects of the Cortex feed translate extremely well to an RSS reader function. Most importantly, Shacknews Reader features a chronological feed. This eliminates the problems that arise from getting your news on a social media platform that pushes information onto your feed based on actions of other users. Shacknews Reader will provide you only what you want to see on your feed. 

With a push of a button users will be able to share articles to the Shacknews Chatty or Cortex. If you are looking to share a news story, sharing to Chatty will probably make more sense, but Shackers who would like to add a personal take or respond to a news story can dive into creating a Cortex article with the Share to Cortex button. 

You can add most of your favorite RSS feeds by pasting the site's URLS into our search bar. If the feed has already been ingested, you will be able to search for the outlet name. Please message Duke Nuked if you run into any problems ingesting a feed into Reader, and we will work to support it.

Stuff you can follow:

YouTube channels

Following a YouTube channel with Shacknews Reader is pretty simple. Just paste the channel home page URL, and Reader will take it from there.

Subreddits

Reddit is certainly a place on the Internet, but do you dislike the upvoting system? Now you can read any subreddit posts in chronological order on Shacknews Reader. You can add any subreddit as an RSS Feed by just adding .rss to the URL you ingest in our search bar. For folks wanting to follow r/wallstreetbets the correct RSS URL would be http://reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets.rss.

Podcast feeds

Shackers can easily follow podcast RSS feeds with Shacknews Reader. There are a lot of great shows out there, and hopefully we can help increase the audiences of these fine podcasts by sharing them within our community.

Websites

Most great websites on the Internet have some form of an RSS feed to follow. Shacknews Reader supports all sorts of feeds, and while they won't all look the same upon ingestion, it is great to have all the news you care about in one place. Maybe Shackers will eventually post links to their favorite feeds in a Cortex or Chatty post. That sure would be neat.

Shacknews Reader also borrows the concept of favorites from our Cortex platform. Shackers can select up to 10 RSS reeds for their favorites list. Click on the MANAGE FEEDS button to organize your favorite feeds that you follow.

Once you are following some feeds, they will show up in My Feeds. Just click the heart button to add them to your favorites list.

Your favorites will be displayed on the MY FEEDS menu on both mobile and desktop versions of Shacknews Reader. Shackers can also jump to any feed they follow from the MANAGE FEEDS menu.

Just click the VIEW PUBLICATION button to go straight to their feed on Reader.

That's a quick overview of Shacknews Reader. We hope you will enjoy the new feature that will launch on the website today. Everything our development team has implemented in the past few years has been done with a laser focus on creating a better user experience for our community.

Today's announcements aren't over just yet. We actually have been working on improving the Shacknews Chatty user experience, and we are ready to ship some new features alongside the launch of Reader.

Shacknews moderators have new tools. Mods are now able to freeze and merge Shacknews Chatty threads. Users can also now flag a thread or subthread for moderation with a push of the FLAG button.

We hope that today's announcements of improvements to Shacknews.com highlight our continued investment in the community. We look forward to adding even more ways to engage with Shacknews over the year as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. 

Please head to Shacknews Reader to start using the new feature.

Today's announcement is dedicated to our dear friend pgharavi.

Lola the Pom

CEO and Chairpet of the Board

Lola was named CEO of Shacknews in April of 2021. She is leading the development team on a number of projects. She doesn't use email, so just email her assistant Asif for any requests. Lola turned seven in 2022, and is excited to continue in her role.