RSS Is NOT Dead

Welcome to Syntax, folks. Today, we're talking about RSS, which is alive and well. We're gonna be talking a little bit about how CJ uses RSS because that's right. Wes is on vacation.

Joining me once again is CJ. What's up, CJ? Not much. I'm excited to talk about this. I've been experimenting with a lot of different ways to read RSS and, you know, just stay up to date with the news. And so, yeah, excited to to share all of my findings.

I'm excited because when anytime people talk about RSS, I just say, alright. I don't know. I don't know. I I don't know if I've ever and I'm gonna say, like, even going back to the year February. I don't think I've ever had a good RSS setup. I used many of the popular apps at the time, like, was it Google Reader warp one of those, you know Google Feed Reader.

Yep. I've used I used a lot of the apps, but I never really got a good system. I'm interested to hear how you use it, but also, like, why, when, and Wes, those types of of things. So I I'm ready to have my mind blowing.

My mind blowing? Yeah. My mind is, is actively blowing, I guess.

Yes. So RSS, it gives you a feed of stuff, yada yada yada. But, the feed that I'm tracking the most is my Sanity feed at sentry.i0 because it lets me know which websites or which websites, which pages have the worst user misery Scott, and that is accounts for a lot of things. Basically, like, how fast and how often these pages are hit. It's letting you know truly what are the pages you need to look at first and foremost if you want to improve the time that people are having on your website. What about, like, payments? You're getting failed payment alerts, things like that. You can keep track of all those things. Error monitoring, session replay, which allows you to see how the bug happened, tracing, code coverage.

Their new platform, Seer, allows you to find the root cause of issues, and it is so very good. It is very, very good. And all around, just improve your application and get code test coverage and all the the lovely things. Sanity also integrates with just about everything and is super easy to get started.

One of my favorite things about the Sentry team is they have really prioritized, like, wizards.

I mean, I like wizards. Give me a Merlin all day. They got a Merlin in here, and for anytime you wanna set it up, that Merlin will go off and just update your code with whatever platform you're using to get you set up with Century without you having to Npm install a whole bunch of stuff. You just say Npm create whatever. I'll have to look at each individual one. But if it's got a Merlin in it, I'm I'm around for that. So, CJ, RSS, let's get back to the topic. Thank you, Century, for producing and sponsoring this episode.

Let's get into it. CSS, what's up what's up with it? What's up with that? Sure. I think we'll we'll start we'll take a step back. I'll define what RSS is for anybody because you probably heard it before.

Give a little bit of history and, like, what's out there and then talk about how how I use it. So it stands for really simple syndication, and it's it's really, really simple syndication. And it is a, typically, you see it as an XML format.

And, essentially, it is just a a list of items. Those items could be anything.

And any website can publish a feed.

And, there are a few different types, but, typically, they're all just grouped into this term of RSS. But RSS was the original standard. There's also Atom feeds. Now there's JSON feeds or JSON web feeds.

But pretty much any RSS reader you come across is gonna be able to read from any one of these formats.

And the idea is a website can expose a feed and basically list what is new newly available on that website, or or it could even be a history of everything available from that website or that thing. So Syntax Heart has an RSS feed.

Feed.syntax.fm, I think that's the URL. Let me try it really quick. That's the one. And if you go there the RSS feed I've spent the most amount of time with. I'll tell you that. Yeah. And so if you go to feed.syntax.fm, you will see an XML data, and it is literally information about every single podcast episode from Syntax that has ever happened. And that's one way of having a feed. So some websites might have a feed that only have, like, the latest articles that have been published on the site in the feed, but our feed literally has every single episode we've ever done. And whenever you're subscribing to a podcast inside of, like, a podcast app, it's actually typically using that XML feed.

And so, typically, blogs, have will have an RSS feed because people post new, blog posts to that site every now and then. So the feed will list the latest blog post that's been added.

Basically, every single news website has an RSS feed because it'll list out the most recent news that has appearing on the on those websites.

Even, Reddit has RSS feed. So any subreddit on Reddit, you can actually get as an RSS feed. So, basically, it's a way for websites to let everyone else know what information is new and available on their site.

And, with that, typically, you could just use an app itself. So if you search the app store on iOS or Android for an RSS feed reader, you can, just plug in the URL to a website, and a lot of these apps will automatically find what their feed is, and then you can use it inside of the app.

But one of the things I typically want is I wanna be able to read from this feed in multiple places. I wanna be able to read from it on my desktop. I wanna be able to read from it on my phone, and I want it to to stay in sync. And so that's where an RSS feed reader server can come into play. So are you with me so far, Scott? Any any questions, thoughts?

Questions or thoughts? You said it's typically XML. Is it always XML?

It's not. So the there's another standard called JSON feed.

The meta type is application slash feed plus JSON.

And it's basically the same thing, but it's just JSON formatted.

And so it has an item's property within array.

Each item is an object that has, like, title, URL, content. So, yeah, it's similar, but just JSON instead of XML.

Cool.

Alright. No. I I'm with you. I'm with you. One of the things to think about here is, so let's take, for example, the the syntax RSS feed. It has literally every episode ever, in that feed. And so in order to know, like, what episodes have I listened to or is an episode new, that's where these apps or these servers come into play because it essentially will just retrieve the feed on a regular basis. Like, I have my server set up to read from these feeds once every hour, but it keeps track of the state in, like, a a local database somewhere. So the first time it gets the feed, all of those are unread items that I haven't seen before. Mhmm. But then the next time it gets the feed, it basically can do a diff to determine what are the new new things that are available.

And so that's what basically takes this really dumb tech, which is literally just a list of items into something that can potentially give you notifications of new items or keep track of what has been read versus what not what has not been read. And so that's why I have a a server set up for this Wes I can basically put in all the RSS feeds that I want, and it does all the hard work. It it's ping it's pulling them every hour to pull in what's the new stuff that I haven't seen before. And then when I'm using an app to read from this feed, it's marking them as red so I don't see them again.

And there's a lot of, self hosted servers that you could use. One of them that's really popular is called Fresh RSS.

I believe it's, like, PHP Bos. And I looked into it a little bit, but eventually, I found one that's called MiniFlux.

They tag themselves as a minimalist and opinionated feed reader. So I am if you've listened Sanity recently They're certainly opinionated on, bad CSS. I'll tell you that. Exactly. If you go to if you go to their website, it is, it's minimal. It's just text and an image and arguably It's like old Reddit. Old old old Reddit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So but but I I like that. And it's it's super fast. I think they built it with, either Rust or Go.

Mhmm.

So works really fast, runs inside of a Docker container. Basically, this I have this running on one of my self hosted servers, and, they provide a web dashboard. So in that web dashboard, I can go in and subscribe to all of these various RSS feeds that I wanna get news from. I don't have a list of them here, but there are also, paid services that basically provide you with an r s RSS feed reader server so you don't have to self host. Sometimes they'll charge you, like, a monthly fee because it's, like, a software as a service, Wes you might be limited in the number of feeds you can subscribe to. So you don't have to self host. If you just go off and search for RSS feed reader, you'll find some some hosted services that you could potentially use instead. But, basically, this is the hub where I log ESLint to and then subscribe to all of my, RSS feeds.

Yeah. I, you know, I know you'll have a section on this later. I am curious about where you're finding the feeds to me. That seems like you really wanna get good feeds, set them up, get them dialed.

People wondering why these things might be paid Vercel, like you mentioned, like, if a server is involved, that server is running a sync process. It is, grabbing on some kind of interval. I would imagine it might be user defined kind of interval. Mhmm. That's not free.

And if you're self hosting it, yeah, you're you're, you know, essentially, whatever you're hosting it is bandwidth Scott on your end or anything like that, which probably isn't gonna hurt you. But if it's another server out there, somebody's gotta pay for that server and its process and stuff like that. So that totally makes sense. I do wonder after looking at all of, I I went on Reddit and was, like, looking at, like, 20 different RSS feed software.

And I gotta say, it's classic me, but I'm looking at this being like, hey. There's an opportunity to make something that actually looks nice. Yeah. Sure.

But it's probably an iceberg of of, like,

getting it to be a actual nice product beyond just looking nice. And I will say one of the things about these servers is a lot of times they expose APIs or they expose feeds of their own. So Okay. Yeah. You could essentially build just a client app that looks good, but just talks to their API or pulls from their from their XML feed. So that's definitely a possibility.

And a lot of these apps, like MiniFlux and Fresh RSS, they have community plug ins or community add ons that add additional functionality or maybe give you, like, a different UI. So they're very customizable in that way. One thing I'll mention about self hosting is, like, you actually don't need very high specs for this. Like, if you already have a server running Coolify, maybe even, like, a a $3 a month or a $1 a month VPS, these these are Synology or something. Exactly. You could run it you could, like, self host it at home with Synology.

These are very low resource servers if you wanna if you wanna host them yourself. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Again, the reason why a service would cost money is because if you got a lot of people on here, that would add up. Yeah. Exactly.

Now one of the reasons I also wanted to set this up is when I'm reading articles on my phone, I more and more just get more aggravated with, first of all, not having dark Node, second of all, being overrun with ads, third of all, having to scroll through nonsense to get to the actual contents.

So but, basically, the I I the the modern web aggravates me. But one of the cool things about our assess readers and specifically with MiniFlex, whenever you add a feed, there's an option in there to fetch article contents. So it will actually do its best to go off and scrape the article and only pull back the the meat of the article, which is, like, the the the text itself. Yeah. And that means that I can actually once I've synced with my server on my mobile phone, I can read offline, or I can read these articles without seeing the ads or without having to go, to the websites themselves. Because that's another thing I don't necessarily like doing is, like, just clicking random URLs to, like, blogs I've never heard of. Mhmm. My server does the hard work of, like, pulling down the contents. And then if I wanna go off to the blog, I can do that myself. But first, I can decide by, like, reading the contents itself. So that's one of the other nice things about these RSS readers is it makes it super streamlined to be able to read through these articles without having to go to a bunch of websites, to actually look at the contents.

Yeah. I do appreciate that. You know what I would even like would be just like, who somebody does this. I forget who. But just,

just a play button at the top to just read it in a nice voice. Yeah. And, I'll I'll talk about the the various clients that you can use, but there's a lot of, feed reader clients for mobile phones or for desktop that have built in speech to speech to text. And so, yeah, let's talk about clients. So I have my server set up. I plug all of my feeds in there. It keeps track of them. It it basically knows when new articles are published or or new news is published on any one of these feeds.

On mobile, I use an app called Capy Reader, like, c a p y reader. It's for Android. But the thing about Capy Reader is it actually interfaces with the Google Feed Reader API.

And with MiniFlux, there's an extension which can basically make it so that it appears as a Google Feed Reader service to anyone that wants to connect to it. So it's basically, like, API compatible. So any app that could talk to the Google Feed Reader interface can talk to this MiniFlux instance. So I'm using CapyReader on my phone, and then on desktop, I'm using an app called, ReadKit for macOS.

It's actually a paid app. I right now, I'm just using the free version of it. But both of them, I just set up. I pointed to the URL of my server, added my, API credentials, which I set up in the integration. And now those two apps can pull in the latest information, from the feeds, and they also can mark things as read. Because this is the other thing JS you you've subscribed to all these feeds. You're getting all these notifications of new articles. You want to silence them somehow or basically archive things that you've already read or seen. So both the desktop app that I use and the mobile app that I use, I have a setting which is just mark as read on scroll. So if I scroll past an article, that means I the title wasn't interesting enough for me to click on it, and so now it's just marked as read, and I'm I'm never gonna see that one again. And then when I click into an article, that will also mark it as read. So I'm either using the desktop app or the mobile app, but all of this is syncing back to the server. So no matter which warp or the mobile app, Node all of this is syncing back to the server. So no matter which side I use it on, it's always gonna show me just my unread articles that I that I haven't read yet. So you you have the you're running these off of a mini,

Flux server, right, you said?

So MiniFlux, is the server itself, but then the app itself is connecting to that URL where where MiniFlux is running. Yeah. Yeah.

With that server, do you then have to, like, authenticate into that server?

You do. And, depending on the integration, you can set up how that works. MiniFlux itself exposes an API and has a section in the dashboard where you can create API keys. Cool. But the way that I'm connecting to it is with the Google Reader API. And in in this Gotcha. When you enable that extension in the settings, you specify a username and a password, and that's the username and password you'll use when you're connecting your various clients to it. So, basically, there are certain apps that are maybe proprietary or, like, software as a service, but apps are compatible with them. And then there are integrations that can basically expose MiniFlux so that it looks like it's coming from one of those paid apps.

Yeah. Okay. Cool. This all sounds very doable to me. I know I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole of trying to make my own client now, which, you know, that that would be a fun exercise anyways, and maybe I'll make a a video on it. I do feel like was it Cappy? What was it called? Cappy? Cappy reader. Yeah. Like a Cappy bar. Yeah. Cappy yeah. I I I understood that it was Cappy Bos instantly, but I did feel like, the title's a little bit too close to crappy reader. Oh, true.

Yeah. But, no. It it looks like a neat solution there. I like that. I I would say I think there's space here even for, like, making a paid app. Because one of the things I haven't added yet, but what I what I want to do JS AI summary, summaries of these articles. Yes. I'm already fetching the contents.

I could use AI to generate summaries and then decide if better decide if I wanna read these articles or if I wanna save them for later. I did come across a mini flux plug in that does AI summaries and, like, you add your OpenAI API key. Haven't played around with it yet, but that's one thing that could be cool. The other thing is, like, figuring out your preferences of, like, articles you've read or articles you've liked and then creating some sort of internal algorithm that, like, surfaces articles first that it thinks you might like. I feel like there's a lot of room. Yeah. Yeah. Discovery for making, an app that works that way but off of your your RSS feeds. And then beyond that, you typically also want to, like, read things later or, like, add bookmarks. So in both of these apps, as I'm scrolling through my feeds of seeing the latest stuff, if there's something that I want to remember or I, you know, I wanna come back to it later, there is a a save, button that basically corresponds to the API and then marks it as a saved article. But I also have an integration with a another self hosted service called Wallabag, which is a read later server.

Yeah.

So you might have heard of Pocket, which is Yeah. Use Pocket. ESLint they're actually shutting down soon.

I don't know if there's, like, replacement services for it, but Wallabag is basically like a self hosted version of Pocket. And this also has that feature of it can fetch the article contents so you're just reading it in, like, a text only mode with your preferred font and your preferred theme and everything else. But Wallabag and MiniFlux integrate together. So if I save an article from my MiniFlux feed, that goes over to Wallabag. And so later, if I open up the Wallabag app, I can see all of the articles that I've saved, and I can see their their full contents as well. That sounds good. You know, I do like that flow, especially, like, maybe in more of the web past where, like, blogs were such a big deal. But I do stumble across blog posts pretty regularly that I wish I could just log somewhere. I use a service called My

Mind.

My Mind.

And it's not necessarily made for that. This is more of like a Pinterest, where you're, like, saving things.

It does say you can add all of your articles and stuff for read later on here. In my mind, it's better for visuals, but I do use this app to collect things if you're looking for a collection type of app that's maybe just not articles specifically.

And there is, like, AI features inside of here, and it does work well. It's it's pretty beautiful app. But, yeah, definitely not not a true pocket replacement, just good for collecting things.

Nice. And, similar idea with MiniFlux Balabag is super low resource. It it runs in a docker container. It can you can put it on, like, a super small VPS. So it's actually just sitting in a docker container right beside my MiniFlux instance, and that's what I use to to read stuff later.

Nice.

Hell, yeah.

So let's say you set all of this up or let's say you don't set it up, but you found a publicly available RSS feed reader, you found the app that you like, you found, like, a read later, where do you find RSS feeds? And my first tip is literally any news website.

One thing you can do on or any website in general that has regular updates or regularly posts, one thing you can do is if you view source and then search the HTML for the word atom, a t o m, that typically will link you to an RSS feed. Or if you just search for feed or search for RSS or search for XML, a lot of times, websites will literally have that feed URL in their source. And if you go to it, you can see the the kind of updates that they make. So any website or any blog typically is gonna have an RSS feed available.

The cool thing about ManyFlux and a lot of these other servers is if you just put the root URL of the website in, it has an algorithm to go off and try and find the feed URL for a website. So, like, if you plugged in syntax.fm, it's smart enough to, like, go grab the source, see if it actually contains RSS or Adam in the response, and then figure out what that URL JS. Or sometimes it will even try all of the common paths. Because a lot of times, website.com/feed or website.com/autumn atom.xml, these are, like, common paths. So it'll go off and figure out where the feed is act is actually if one exists, and then it'll automatically add it for you. I would have to imagine there's a Chrome extension that would just

pull something like that automatically for you too. Definitely. I I will say,

if you've ever seen the RSS icon like, just go to go to Wikipedia and look for what the RSS icon looks Yeah. It's a it's a, like, a it's like a sideways Wi Fi sign.

On any given website, if you see that in the footer or in the header, typically, that is going to link you off to the RSS feed, and then you can plug it into these feed readers, and they're gonna start pulling in

updates from those sites. Unless it was a purchase template, that they never pasted the link in. Those are abundant sometimes. I remember that classic orange that classic orange pixelated, little Wes two point o style RSS Exactly. Like on classic.

Honestly, this kind of gets to the pinpoint that Wes talked about a while back of, like, is RSS dead? I actually have found recently that websites that claim to have RSS don't anymore. Like, their RSS functionality broke, and they didn't keep track of it. Like, I don't know if this is the case, but, Tanner Lindsley, his personal blog, I tried to subscribe to the RSS feed, and the r RSS feed doesn't exist anymore. I think if you could Tanner on blast here. Tanner well, it's just the the the example that came to mind.

Let me see if it's in here. Yeah. So if you CJ slams Tanner Lindsley for his broken RSS feed.

Yeah. If you look in the source for tannerlindsley.com, there is a link with a type of application slash RSS plus XML. It links to slash feed.xml.

But if you go there, you get a four zero four of this this page cannot be found. So I don't know what he's using for his blog or if he disabled the RSS plug in, but it's like a red herring. And he hasn't posted anything since 2023, so it's not that big of a deal. But, basically, MiniFlux has I I I I'll talk about this in a second, but I figured out how to get the RSS feeds for a a bunch of different people, plugged in, like, 300 of them into MiniFlux.

And then it just started reporting all the ones that said they have a feed URL, but then it just returned returned nothing.

So yeah. Yeah. So that's one way. Just find the RSS feed on a site. Another way is to go to, like, literally any news website. But a site that was recommended to me by Ben, who's no longer at Syntax, but we miss him, and he's great. Ben vinegar. Ben vinegar. Yes. Brutalist.report.

I will say if you've listened to this whole episode Node now you're turned off to, like, I don't wanna set up an RSS feed, but maybe you do want, like, minimalist news, check out brutalist.report because this is, like, the most recent published articles from every single news site across the web. So tech news, political news, science news, gaming news, all this kind of stuff, and it's just a static website with links to all of the most recent articles from all of these news sites.

So my suggestion is if you go here to brutalist.report and you see a website that has links that look interesting to you, go to that website and find the RSS feed because that's how brutalist report is working. It's literally just pulling in the RSS feed of the most recent articles from every single one of these websites. So some, tech news websites that I subscribe to are The Verge, Yarn Technica, The Register, and then there are some news sites that aren't all tech news, but sometimes they have a specific tech feed. Like, you can tap into just the tech feed for the bbc.com.

And so Mhmm. Instead of every single article being published by b BBC, it's a feed of only the ones that are related to to tech. Yeah. And and we we were talking about this,

off camera, but this seems like it would definitely prevent me from doing that thing that I love to do when I read an article JS to look at the comments. It's like Yes. Bro. Why am I doing this? And and then you make an account, and then you have to be angry in a comment because somebody said something you disagree with. Like, it is it is such a hard thing to resist. It's such a hard thing to resist. Yes. And I haven't mentioned that. Would make me do this. Yeah. But this is one of the reasons I started doing this. Like, I found myself you might have been listening to this whole episode and be like, why don't you just use Reddit? Because Reddit is a link aggregator.

But this is exactly why because I'm scrolling Reddit, and the app typically directs you to the comments before it directs you to the article itself.

And so then you're seeing people that are commenting on something that maybe they haven't read yet, or you're seeing people that are just, like, touting nonsense and, like, that makes my blood boil, and I just wanted out I I I don't wanna see it anymore. I just wanna see the article. I can have my own opinions about it. And if I really wanna dig deeper and know what other people are thinking about it, I can potentially find it on Reddit or or Hacker News or whatever else. So this is one of the reasons why I did this is because I wanna get my news from the source and not have to wait for somebody to submit it to Reddit.

Yeah. Yeah. And and, honestly, the more I think about it, it's like it's like the the Reddits I visit often are typically pulling news from just a couple of sources. Exactly. Yeah.

There's no reason why I can't just add those sources to an RSS feed. CJ, I am a believer.

One other feed source I'll mention is literally Hacker News itself. So news.ycombinator.com.

They have an RSS feed instantly available, and this is most of what Reddit talks about eventually anyways. Like, Hacker News was kind of, like, the original link aggregator before Reddit took off. And so I actually have the Hacker News RSS feed, plugged into my news server, and so I can see all of the, most up upvoted articles that are being posted on Hacker

News in my feed as well. Yeah. Cool. Hell yeah. Yeah.

Lastly is, I mentioned it earlier, but you tip you can actually pull in subreddits if you want to. So if you go to reddit.com/rslash, let's say, programming, if you put .rss on the end, that will give you back an RSS feed for, the most recent or, like, the most upvoted posts in r/programming right now.

That's fine, but the thing about their RSS feed is the content is literally just the link to the article and the link to the comments.

I wanted the articles themselves, so I literally just wrote a little serverless function that pulls in the RSS feed and then respits it out with only the links.

And then I can also filter out things like self posts or things that I don't want, and then I plug that RSS feed into my feed server.

And you can just do that, folks.

We have the ability. Yeah. Just write a serverless function. And it I mean, I'm hosting it on Deno. It was super simple to be like, fetch this, filter, spit out an RSS feed. And then the last place I'll mention where you can get RSS feeds is, from Blue Sky. Now the the reason this is the case is because a lot of people have their personal websites as their username on Blue Sky. So, like, Wes is Wes username or, s, ESLint dot ski is is Scott's username. Yes. And so what I did is I went and or I wrote a script to grab all of the people that I'm following, filter it down to people that are just the or to just their, anybody that has a custom domain set as their username, And then I went off and found any one of those domains that had an RSS feed. So my MiniFlex instance is subscribed to, like, over 300 feeds, but that includes the personal feeds of, like, the 2,000 or so people that I'm following on Blue Sky. And so that was a really easy way to find the blogs and RSS feeds for all the people that I already follow anyways.

Cool. And, one of the cool things about that is, like, you might actually see these articles if you're subscribed to the source, like, if you're subscribed to these prolific people that are blogging or, like, more plugged into the tech scene, you might see their blog post in your RSS feed before you even see it resubmitted to Reddit or resubmitted to Hacker News.

Sick. Yeah. This is a, again, a topic I was I've always been, like, a little bit like, this is a nerd thing. Why would I care about this? As a nerd myself, it is, like, very you know, sometimes Wes you, like, don't get it, you can just, like, look at it and be like, Scott for me. Node. You've done a great job of really explaining the benefits here and why my care it feels ridiculous that I am just about 40 years old, and I'm now like, Maybe I should give RSS a try. But, that's that's just how it works sometimes, I suppose. Glad to hear it. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. Well, thank you so much for this. I, again, really eye opening, and I Node all these tools. I I can't wait to spend time creating my own client and, abandoning it two months later, but that's how it goes.

Folks, if you if you are out there and you are listening to this episode, join us on YouTube. We're doing all kinds of cool stuff. CJ just released a video on Claude Node that is really super good. We're doing fun CSS battles. We made annoying CAPTCHAs. We're doing videos that you cannot get in the podcast show feed.

We also do video episodes of every single one of these podcasts. If you care to see any of us enunciating or, showing our our screen on on camera every once in a while and all that stuff, check us Scott. Youtube.com/@syntaxfm,

and you can find us there. CJ, anything else to say before we get out of here? That's all I Scott, but break yourself from the chains of Reddit and make your own RSS server. So yeah.

I'm I'm ready. Cool. I'm ready.

Alright. Cool. We'll catch you guys later. Peace.