Why write an RSS Feed Reader in Year of Our Lord 2025
Old man reminisces about the past
I love RSS. In my opinion, it's one of the best parts of the open web. For those reading who were born this century, an RSS feed is a list of all available posts on a website. That's it. If you like my blog, you just slap the link to the RSS feed into your feed reader and boom - everything I write appears in your feed reader in chronological order!
The Scourge of Algorithmic Feeds
When Facebook rolled it's hot, new Timeline feed out in like.. 2011 or something? It was controversial. Why would I want to see an endless, shifting parade of content in place of a list of posts by my friends and pages I want to follow, presented in the order in which they have been posted? People complained about how the experience was worse, yet here we are, like the proverbial frog in a pot everybody dealt with the rising water temperature.
Now, I honestly don't know if any of my friends still post to Facebook! I see the odd post from my dad in a sea of memes and content.
There's got to be a better way!
I've used Miniflux as my feed reader of choice for several years now, but I've always had the issue where larger news sites might post 20 times a day. If I don't actively log in and prune my unread queue, I end up overwhelmed, mark all as read and sometimes miss out on smaller blog posts.
I was talking with some friends about my ideal feed reader's features and I came to the conclusion that what I wanted was pretty basic, I just wanted to see new posts and prune them based on a time frame configurable on a per-feed basis.
The next step was to conduct an in depth analysis of options currently on the market and identify off the shelf options that filled that niche.
But that's boring, so instead, on the bus home from work one afternoon I started hacking together an API in FastAPI. Pretty quickly I pulled together a nice little REST API! Next, I started to wrestle with Vue and then remembered I'm a backend goblin - I don't know what a JavaScript is, so I did a little bit of reading and settled on Jinja2 templates because they were directly name dropped on the FastAPI docs.
Over the course of a few more weeks worth of bus rides, I pulled together some pages for uploading feeds, reading posts, managing settings. Y'know. The things you do with an RSS reader. Finally, I had something halfway usable. As usable as black Times New Roman on white gets. I could step back, appreciate my handiwork and wonder why do I even have REST APIs if I'm not using them?? So in the bin all of those bad boys go!
Its time to rub some colours on this thing. Now, I'm not a designer so I set up a CSS file and fired up a palette generator. An hour of plugging hex codes in later, I end up with something not totally ghastly.
I've been using it for a few days now and sure, there are some rough edges but broadly speaking, its doing the job! I'm going to keep tinkering away with it for a while and once I'm happy I'll chuck the code up online somewhere for the dozens of us who still use RSS!