/rssfeed

Web application written in Go to curate articles from multiple RSS feeds like HackerNews, Reddit, etc. It will significantly improve your reading experience while using your favorite RSS client.
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  2. Other 1.8%
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images
mercury
newsfeed
parsers
.gitignore
Dockerfile
Makefile
README.md
docker-compose.yml
main.go
web_check.go
web_index.go
web_news.go
web_register.go

README.md

Curated RSS Feed

Install using Go

You'll need Go and either Reeder or Cappuccino.

go get -u github.com/cixtor/rssfeed

Install using Docker

You'll need Docker Desktop and either Reeder or Cappuccino.

docker-compose up -d

Usage

Reeder Cappuccino

Story Time

I'm a fan of RSS, too bad many people are killing it, directly or indirectly.

I few months ago I discovered a new app for macOS called Cappuccino. Very nice —native— interface, minimalistic. Unfortunately, being a new app, sooner than later I started to find bugs here and there, not with the interface but with the content that many websites were returning in their RSS feeds, some of which would only render a title and a link to view the actual article (looking at you Hacker News).

Fast-foward a few days, Reeder —another famous macOS app— got released for free in the Mac App Store. I immediately switched and imported my OPML file. Working pretty good, I have to say, but I was still facing the same problems that I had with Cappuccino: many RSS feeds were returning just an excerpt of the actual article. Fortunately Reeder offers a function called "Mercurity Reader" where they send the link to a web API service —owned by Postlight— and returns a clean version of the content, similar to what Safari, Firefox and others do with the "Reader View".

Unfortunately, this forces me to click 1-2 more times to start reading.

Wait! Am I really complaining about 1-2 extra clicks?

Well, yes, what's the point of RSS if you cannot read the content from there?

I understand that in today's world of "News by Subscription" adding the full content of the article to the RSS feed allows people to pirate the content, read "piracy" as "go around the paywall". But if your website wasn't so bloated with JavaScript and ads I would surely visit it and pay for the subscription.

I immediately started working on a web service to act as a proxy for all the RSS feeds that I am subscribed to. The API would take all the links from these feeds and send them to Mercuriy, cache them locally, and then returning a bigger RSS feed (with full content) to either Cappuccino or Reeder.

Fallback Mechanism

Some news websites block Mercury, so I had to implement a fallback mechanism to parse the website if Mercury is not able to access its content. I did this with simple string replacements. The code is quite flacky, and will surely break, but if it's just me sending requests then maybe they will notice.