VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Chris Titus Tech
Browse the Web Better
Description generated by Skrybot
The user discusses the evolution of internet browsing, highlighting issues with search engine results and excessive ads. They emphasize the use of tools like uBlock Origin and Brave to improve browsing experience. The user also explains how they utilize RSS feeds to efficiently browse content, avoiding ads and distractions. They share insights on setting up RSS feeds and Docker containers for content aggregation. The user encourages others to explore RSS for a more streamlined internet browsing experience.
Transcription generated by Skrybot
how we used to browse the internet. Was it better? Now obviously this is just a Jurassic Park emulation in the background, but it's still from that era, so I'm going to leave it up until I show you how we do it today. Before, we used to pull up a web browser, we'd type in what we want, not get what we're looking for, and then end up in this, you know, completely different area. Sometimes we'd be shown bad results quite often. It's like if you use Bing now. Really, a lot of times when we use Google and even DuckDuckGo, both these are pretty good at getting us to where we go. But along the way, we experience some heartache.
Let me show you that, and I'm going to show you how to fix this. So let's get on the desktop here. All right, over on Google, we're going to type in best office chair, because I know that one's going to have all kinds of shenanigans. So our current experience is. . . we are lined up with a whole bunch of ads. We click on any of these, Google gets paid. That's how Google makes all its money. These are not in any particular order or from any particular place except whoever the highest bidder was. So not really in our best interest. You can see the top two results are ads.
Funny enough, back in the mid-2000s when Google was really getting a head start, they promised never to do. . . precisely what they're doing today. They said, we're not gonna bloat your search up with a bunch of nonsense. We're not gonna bloat it up with a bunch of ad results. We're just gonna show you what you need to know. Now, you can still kind of get this. Like, I'm using Brave. You can use extensions like uBlock Origin, and then you get a better result. Like, this is what Google should be, but many people don't do this, and they just get served ads, and you click on the things that pays Google. And that's basically how the web works.
Although I will say it does work still better than how it did back in the day. So I'm not saying we should go back in time. I understand. And I remember living the heartache of going, oh my gosh, I just want to know. But the other problem is, is a lot of the website quality has gone down. Where before, when you did find a good website, you remembered, you bookmarked it, and then you always went back to that website. Not to say that doesn't happen today.
but it's a different experience because a lot of times when you're looking for i'll use linux for an example because the linux searches on the web are atrocious let's go top arm linux distro yeah like this one this is like slant.
co this is just a garbage website that just tries to figure out what people are searching for and then just tossing up a bunch of nonsense so they'll give all kinds of weird results with this again like ubuntu is not even on here which is arguably one of the i would say it's one of the top definitely the top three arm based spins in linux you can see the top top pro simple to use top con hard to use thanks thanks modern web and websites in general and why it's like this is because they don't really care about the content itself this is not what made them click through let's remove our ad blocker this is why the modern web is what it is you're going to have an anchor ad down here that they're getting paid on you're going to see adsense right here you're going to see adsense and other ads maybe maybe even working with a third-party vendor to actually implement it in article there's another ad they're getting paid for each one of these ad and i want to put it in perspective here because i also understand the modern web and chris titus.
com is paid for with ads and you'll see these are my modern articles. Now, let me remove my ad blocker, which if you want to use an ad blocker on my website, by all means, go for it. Some people don't, and it just pays for itself. I get it, and I'll show you the two vendors I'm using. I don't know if I'm violating any terms of service here, but I don't care. We're just going to show it so you understand the amount of money different websites are making. We'll go into an article. You'll see I have one anchor ad down here.
This is actually not done through AdSense it's due through something called info links which is another subsidiary that pays me per impressions per click but they only go up to a certain amount per day but it's a little bit better than AdSense and then we go into this one I don't put any in article ads I think it's just immoral and it kind of takes away from the actual feeling of the article for those that don't want to use an ad blocker you'll see we have one ad over on the right This is actually Google AdSense. You can see by the icons. So let's first look how much money I make on this. I roughly have about 150,000 users per month, probably around a quarter of a million page views.
And here is my performance over on AdSense. You can see today I've made $1. 55. Yesterday I made $3. 45. I pay roughly about 20 or 30 dollars a month for the website so I'm actually making a little bit of a profit by running the website. Obviously the time I put into the articles isn't worth the amount of money I make but at least it's something. But when you start multiplying these types of earnings and you start doing in article ads, anchor ads, and then do all ads pretty much everywhere how most sites traditionally monetize it can get really lucrative. So besides ad blocker, what else can we do? Obviously running an ad blocker, uBlock Origin or Brave is recommended for browsing the web.
I don't know how anybody browses the modern web without an ad blocker, but I appreciate it if you do browse my website without one, because I do get paid as you just saw, but I don't really browse the web this way either. You know, sometimes I might type in something I might be looking to buy, but for the most part, I do a lot more in RSS. Now, I did a past video in RSS, but I really expanded this out a lot more because RSS, by stock settings, you just add your feeds into like Thunderbird or something like that, a reader of some sort. Some of them online, if you do like a cloud synced reader, they charge anywhere between three and $10. That's no good.
I use fresh RSS on my own hosted server, but I take it a step further. Like Gizmodo here. let's say i wanted to know what's going on with ftx crashing or becoming insolvent bummer for crypto people out there this actually gives me the whole article and you might be thinking how in the world did you get all this right in to your feed so i never have to visit their website that becomes the next thing i did on my server and that's where i actually feed these in at And I'm using Docker as the host, so I don't even have to really do much configuration. And then for the next Docker container I use is called full text RSS feed, five fingers.
Now, in a prior RSS video, I showed you how to use one online. This one, I think, is a lot better because it's grabbing every image. It's just doing a better job of scraping these websites and pulling in all the articles with no ads or any of that business. And it's giving me just a better result. So this is why I recommend this type of Docker container. But. these even have a subscription service let's say you don't want to set this up in a docker and you just want to pay money to escape this by all means you can i think their monthly fee is anywhere between five and ten dollars by finger filters.
org i don't have an affiliate or anything with them you can buy their their filtration where you get like a 40 dollars i think a year for for the personal use or you could just download the docker container i'm actually using this for free right because it's all right there on GitHub. So if it's open source, I guess we can just take it and use it. So that's what I've been doing for this is an unofficial Docker container for full text RSS service. Absolutely love this. This is amazing. So to utilize all this and get your own feeds, we're going to use full text RSS. This is where we start. Grab the web article or the RSS feed from the website. Many websites like mine will have.
this little cool icon right here. You'd click on that and get your RSS feed from there. But I don't like to do this because most websites hide their RSS feed these days. So I just use the get RSS feed URL, copy this, and then come back to our full text, paste it. And then we usually limit the max items. I only like to grab 10. Scroll through, make sure it's scraping everything correctly. You're getting all the images, videos. Once you've looked through and you're like, okay, this is perfect. I need to get this whole thing.
copy the address, come back into our fresh RSS reader, hit a plus sign, paste it into our feed URL, categorize it, which this is just, YouTube is where I'll put it. And then we go back to our feed URL and there is everything. So, oh, NeoVM, what did I say about that? You can read the entire article without ever leaving your RSS feed, which is awesome. And if you want to click on this for the YouTube video, boom, it would just spit you out to the YouTube. And.
the subscription management is actually really intuitive if you come into here let's say i don't want to read my own article that i wrote i would just remove it from my rss feed come back it's all gone how awesome is that if you want to set this up yourself over on my website that's funny see it's come full circle now but over on my website this will probably be the last thing you need to do is for feed aggregation i'm using that docker container and then for the reader i'm using this docker container now you can set these up independently on your linux box and just run it as a full service but the docker containers i like are just self-contained and they just auto update so i never have to worry about them and i have it all set up seamlessly using both of these settings right here to install and run them.
And then for updates, I use something called Watchtower. I'll make a separate Docker video in the future, kind of going over this setup. But if you're familiar with Docker, check it out. I think Network Chuck has a good Docker video as well. I need to dive a little deeper than that and show people kind of how I utilize it, though. But getting back to that, with those two projects installed, how I'm browsing the Internet is basically just going, OK, I want to load general tech news today. And I can just sit here and scroll through, almost like I'm scrolling through 10 or 20 websites, and I can just flip through until I see something that kind of catches my eye.
Oh, 10 movies I need to watch this Thanksgiving? What do they recommend here? Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is a good article right here. That's one of my favorites. I love, you know, Snoopy was one of my favorite characters as a child. Friendsgiving, I don't think I ever saw that. I might have to pick that up. Maybe toss it in my radar. I didn't just say that. but you can go through here and pick out stuff. So let's say you're done with the article and you're ready to move on. Just click to dead space and it'll just spit you right back out here. So you can easily go through every single article and you get a really good basis of what's going on.
And if you want to take a deeper dive on a certain headline, you can. Or sometimes you get laughable articles like this one right here. Seven best antiviruses for the Amazon Fire tablet. Turn your Amazon Fire tablet from complete garbage to on-fire dumpster fire with antivirus. Like, who installs an antivirus on Amazon Fire? Having said that, we're going to take a quick detour because we need to come back to my website and type debloat fire. Yeah, I have a how to speed up your Amazon Fire tablet.
this removes all the garbage makes it a regular google tablet and does that check that out i've done a video on this i probably should follow back up again but this is by far what you need to do for any amazon tablet user and anyways this is how i browse the internet i look at my windows if i want to look at youtube i put all my youtube stuff in here i'm like okay what who's released stuff learn linux tv released two videos today I just look at the videos and if I want to like, ooh, that's interesting Linux myth busting. I might look at what Jay did for this video and just click on here to launch into his video. That'd be pretty cool.
So that's kind of how I browse YouTube. It's how I browse the internet. I pull it all into fresh RSS and then I expand on it. So let me know your thoughts on RSS. How do you guys like this setup? what can I do to improve? I'm constantly refining how I use my computer to be more efficient, and I encourage you to do the same. But many people just can't be bothered to do this, and with that, the algorithm will take advantage of you and spend you wherever you want. Maybe that's how you found me, so thank you for doing that.
But I want to make you a better internet user and have more time in your day, and I feel like RSS is what gives me that. If not, let me know in the comments. And with that, I'll see you in the next one. .
S K R Y B O T
Skrybot. 2023, Video transcriptions from YouTube
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