Yes that’s right. 20 characters…………
Maybe someday? Seems like someone mentioned GoodLinks during one of the Evernote discussions here and I decided to try it. I use it almost exclusively on my iPad, but it also works with Safari and Chrome on Mac.
No … you will need a adblocker for that.
I have several ad blockers installed. Do I need to add ad blockers to NetNewsWire as well?
It’s not an either/or — one can use, say, NetNewsWire in concert with GoodLinks, sharing links from the former to the latter.
I have NextDNS specifically to hide article adverts on Apple News, which have gotten to be horribly intrusive with multiple attention-shredding examples every story.
One Apple News tip even if you’re not using NextDNS — if you have a story you want to save (like with GoodLinks) or do something else with, tap the share button. If you see Safari in the list of sharing targets, that means there’s almost always a web-accessible version of the page which can therefore also be accessed in GoodLinks (or wherever).
FieryFeeds is the best newsreader period if you enjoyed Mr.Reader and Ole Moritz’ Newsrack before that…

I’ve settled into ReadKit for awhile now. One time payment. I love the design and one particular feature in particular comes in very handy: Saved searches, aka, smart folders for keywords. It follows the usual 3 pane design that most RSS apps have adopted. Frankly, I prefer the grid style offered by Apple News. Like most other RSS apps ReadKit also offers the option to tap a button and get the full feed of most articles even if they are not offered by the publisher.
And of course, like most RSS apps offers organization of feeds into folders. Checking feeds is reliable and fast. Lots of other features too but I’ll not offer a full review here. ![]()
I suggest that you either view the articles with their ads, pay to subscribe to the source, or stop reading the articles.
I use rss to keep me up to date with camera and photography articles that I might be interested in. But when I select an article to read, I always do so by pressing the B key in my Reeder app as it takes me directly to the article on the website that is hosting it. That gives them page views and ad reads. It seems like the least that I could do in return for the interesting and valuable information that I hope to find in an article. I also pay sources that consistently provide interesting and valuable information.
I have purchased Readkit, Lire and Reeder Classic.
I use Readkit a lot the only thing missing is Goodlinks integration and this app would be perfect for me.
I highly recommend you take a look at News Explorer. It is an RSS reader and my primary way of reading.
It allows you to set different readers for different sources, and you can even set Web/Browser view (Reader view) for specific sources. That is very useful for sites where you have to sign in or there is a paywall.
It even lets you read comments on some sites too.
I use this in conjunction with Good Links, where I primarily read in News Explorer but push some articles to Good Links for highlighting and reading later. Good Links handles paywalled content much better with the sign-in functionality.
It has apps for Mac, iOS, and iPadOS and has a trial.
I often use Safari’s Reader View to filter out ads and formatting. No need to rely on RSS in my world. I also avoid Apple News for a whole lot of reasons.
There are really three things you need to consider together, in my experience.
- How you will gather the articles from the various RSS feeds you wish to follow
- How you will read and organise them
- How you will capture their contents for more in depth reading (later) or to copy and paste content elsewhere.3.
There’s a lot to be said for using an RSS aggregator service (like newsblur or feedly) for (1). These keep a copy of the articles from the RSS feeds you subscribe to, so that they are instantly ready for you when you need them (instead of downloading from all over the net), often capture the full content (not just the extract in the RSS feed), some even remove ads and other cruft. Some allow you to add other content (e.g. newsletters) to your collection. I use and am happy with Newsblur
But I don’t use newsblur’s app as my reading app (2). I love unread but have previously used Reeder Classic and Readkit with some success. It’s not just that these apps allow you to read what’s in the RSS feed, but they clean up the display of content, fetch full articles and images and reduce the cruft, clutter and eye-pain from so much internet content.
Goodlinks is simply excellent as a read later app and plays very nicely with the ecosystem so you can share content into other apps and places.
There are costs to all these but I see good quality experience in reading RSS content as a valuable service.
@karlnyhus, I understand and I agree, to a point. As I said above, I recognize advertising is important to support access to free articles. Publishers and authors need and deserve to be paid.
My problem is not the advertising per se, it is how it is done. Placing ads at the top, bottom, or along the side of articles is fine. Placing multiple, bright-colored intrusive ads embedded throughout an article that interrupt my reading is not. Ads in print are becoming like local news ads. There are almost more minutes devoted to ads than minutes to the news.
I understand that this is a matter of opinion, but I believe there is a limit to how intrusive advertisements can be without, for lack of a better term, “disrespecting” the reader. As for paying for content, I am more than willing to do so—I subscribe to Apple News for articles and pay separate subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.
Again, I want to emphasize that publishers and authors deserve to get paid—I do not wish to “steal” content. Advertising is one way they get paid. But publishers and authors also need to respect the reader and let him or her read without ads distracting from the content.
I’m open to being persuaded that I’m wrong in expecting publishers and authors to respect the reader by placing enticing relevant ads “around” articles, but not in them.
Yes and no. The content that gets sent to the RSS feed usually does not contain the plethora of Javascript tags that the proper websites include, so usually what you get is plain HTML, although you will get a briefed version of the article to make you visit the website. But then, the RSS readers will probably have some kind of “full article view” that passes the full website URL through a process like Safari Reader View. So, mixed bag here and it depends a lot of the RSS you are following.
News Explorer, I specially like the “Gallery View” for feeds with lots of articles.
I would not use a feed service, but rely on RSS readers that use iCloud for syncing subscriptions and read status.
I ended up shifting my RSS to K-Tool to my kindle. Not sure if that works in the kindle app. https://ktool.io/
Another +1 on NetNewsWire. Since it’s open source and free, consider it as a starting point and compare others against it.
My recommendation is that you use Feedly as your RSS aggregator since it is free. Then use NetNewWire as your RSS reader since it is also free. You can then add any feed that you would like. Also for instances where someone only provides a partial feed NNW has a feature where you can have a feed give you the reader mode view of the full article.
As for being ad free YMMV because ads can still appear if they are put into the feed but they will not be as intrusive and a better experience than straight from the web or news app.
I love Feedly - however it’s not really free: Stay ahead of the curve with Feedly AI - up to 100 feeds is free. After that it’s $$.
Feedly has some awesome tools, however it does cost.
Another thumbs up for News Explorer. I use it on my Mac, my iPad, and my phone. If I were looking for a budget-friendly RSS reader and read-it-later app, I’d use GoodLinks and News Explorer.
When I use Apple News I do so with Express VPN running and that kills all the ads in the articles in Apple News.
Also, I agree: the ads are exceptionally annoying.
