Zacusca BETA
Zacusca separates signal from noise in your RSS feeds.
- Start by importing RSS feeds from your existing reader.
- Tell Zacusca which categories matter to you.
- Zacusca will fetch items from the feeds, categorise them and return them in new feeds.
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Let's say you're subscribed to BBC World News, NPR Music's YouTube channel and a few others.
In a typical feed reader you see all items from all feeds. There might be one feed sorted by date. Or maybe you can group by publisher. Certain readers have other methods of choosing what to show you.
But, generally speaking, you don't have a great deal of control over what you see. BBC, NPR and others do.
So the first step to use Zacusca is to export your existing feeds. These come out in a structured format called OPML.
The next step is to define how you want items to be grouped. Let's say you want 'News about the Balkans' and 'Jazz'.
Zacusca's LLMs look at all of the items in your feeds. Let's say there's an article from BBC News about a pan-Slavic vegetable spread competition. That would go into the 'News about the Balkans' group. A BBC News article about this year's Montreux Jazz Festival would go into 'Jazz'. An NPR video with a rock band goes into the special 'None' feed.
Now you export your new feeds. When you import them to your reader you can now see the critical Balkan and jazzy updates without having to trawl through everything else.
Note: If you don't already use RSS it's best if you sign up to hear when the Zacusca 'wrapper' is ready.
An RSS feed is a list of articles, videos or podcasts.
Typically you can access a feed at a web address. For example:
- BBC World News:
- Web page is at https://bbc.co.uk/news/world.
- And the same content is in the RSS feed: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml
- NPR Music's YouTube channel
- Web: https://www.youtube.com/@nprmusic.
- RSS feed: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC4eYXhJI4-7wSWc8UNRwD4A
Why is this useful?
It means that the list of articles, videos and podcasts can be understood by another application. So rather than visit every page separately, your 'RSS reader' can suck them all into one place. It's what powers most podcast players.
An OPML (.opml) file is a list of RSS feeds.
You can export an OPML of your feeds from most RSS readers.
That makes it really easy to switch between readers. You can see how subscribing directly to sites and then being able to switch between applications puts you, the reader, in control.
The only place where you lacked control, until now, is that most readers don't filter by relevance.
This is a Banquet product. So I have a tendency to give things gastronomic names.
It was only supposed to be a placeholder but I haven't come up with anything better. After all, making zacusca involves mixing.