Tweaking Handy Reading
In my previous post, I offered my very early impressions of a free and open source Android feed reader and read-it-later app called Handy Reading. My early impressions were very favorable because, by combining feed reading and read-it-later into a local app, it perfectly suits my reading-flow (see my post on combining feeds with a read-it-later solution). However, I had one pressing issue with Handy Reading:
Handy Reading re-fetches old, previously seen articles from a small number of feeds, which is a bit annoying.
Two days later, I think that I have tentatively resolved the issue. By default, Handy Reading has a short "keep old articles" time. It seems that if a feed is offering old articles outside the scope of Handy Reading's kept article time, it will re-fetch those old articles and display them is new even if you have already marked them as read in the app. Fortunately, Handy Reading allows you to set the keep old articles period on a feed-by-feed basis. I have been doing that with the offending feeds and so far the results have been good.
Provided no new issues pop up, I will try a few additional features of Handy Reading before proceeding to a review. One issue that I am particularly interested in is testing its import/export functionality, since that proved to be an issue with my previous solution -- Flym DecSync. I recently talked to one Mastodon user who reported that Handy Reading does not handle Mastodon feeds, which is true. While I hope this is fixed, it is not a priority for me since I do not use my feed reader for social feeds.