926: RSS Is NOT Dead

Scott and CJ explore why RSS still matters and how it’s more underused than outdated. They discuss how to self-host RSS readers, escape the noise of the modern web, and reclaim a cleaner, ad-free reading experience across devices. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:09 Brought to you by Sentry.io 02:41 What is RSS and how does it work? RSS Atom (web standard) JSON Feed 06:14 Hosting your own RSS server: Miniflux, FreshRSS, and more Miniflux FreshRSS 11:00 Decluttering the web with article scraping 12:38 Best RSS clients for desktop and mobile Capy Reader Google Reader ReadKit Pocket is shutting down wallabag mymind 18:51 Where to find RSS feeds The Brutalist Report Programming Subreddit Hacker News BlueSky Shameless Plugs Syntax YouTube Channel: Cursor User Tries Claude Code Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax, folks. Today, we're talking about RSS, which is alive and well. We're going to 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?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  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 just share all of my findings.

• 0:29Scott Tolinski?

  I'm excited because when anytime people talk about RSS, I just say, "All right, I don't know. I don't know if I've ever..." And I'm saying, like, even going back to the year 2000, 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 or one of those?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, Google Feed Reader.

• 0:52Scott Tolinski?

  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 where, those types of things. So I'm ready to have my mind blowing. My mind blowing? Yeah, my mind is actively blowing, I guess. Yes, so RSS, it gives you a feed of stuff, yada, yada, yada. But the feed that I'm checking the most is my Sentry feed at sentry.io, because it lets me know which websites, or which websites, which pages have the worst user misery score. 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,

• 1:35Scott Tolinski?

  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 lovely things. Sentry 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.

• 2:20Scott Tolinski?

  They got a Merlin in here and for any time you want to 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 Sentry 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 it's got a Merlin in it. I'm around for that. So CJ, RSS, let's get back to the topic. Thank you Sentry for producing and sponsoring this episode. Let's get into it. RSS. What's up with it?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Sure. I think we'll start, we'll take a step back. I'll define what RSS is for anybody because you've probably heard it before. Give a little bit of history and like what's out there and then talk about 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.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  But pretty much any RSS reader you come across is going to 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 it could even be a history of everything available from that website or that thing. So Syntax 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-

• 4:00Scott Tolinski?

  The RSS feed I've spent the most amount of time with. I'll tell you that.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  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 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

• 4:48Speaker 01

  recent news that has appearing 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 want to be able to read from this feed in multiple places. I want to be able to read from it on my desktop. I want to be able to read from it on my phone and I want it to stay in sync.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And so that's where an RSS feed reader server can come into play. So are you with me so far, Scott? Any questions, thoughts?

• 5:41Scott Tolinski?

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

• 5:46Speaker 01

  It's not. So there's another standard called JSON feed. The meta type is application/feed plus JSON. And it's basically the same thing, but it's just JSON formatted. And so it has an items property with an array. Each item is an object that has like title, URL, content. So yeah, it's similar, but just JSON instead of XML.

• 6:11Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. All right. No, I'm with you. I'm with you.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  One of the things to think about here is, so let's take for example, 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 local database somewhere. So the first time it gets the feed, all of those are unread items that I haven't seen before. But then the next time it gets the feed, it basically can do a diff to determine what are the new things that are available. And so that's what basically takes this really dumb

• 6:59Speaker 01

  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 has not been read. And so that's why I have a server set up for this, where I can basically put in all the RSS feeds that I want, and it does all the hard work. It's polling 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 read, 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-based, 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.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  So I am, if you've listened to a recent episode-

• 7:46Scott Tolinski?

  Although they're certainly opinionated on bad CSS, I'll tell you that.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. If you go to their website, it is, it's minimal. It's just text and an image, and arguably-

• 7:57Scott Tolinski?

  It's like old Reddit. Old Reddit, yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. But I like that. And it's super fast. I think they built it with either Rust or Go.

• 8:06Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Works really fast, runs inside of a Docker container. Basically, 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 want to get news from. I don't have a list of them here, but there are also paid services that basically provide you with an 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, or 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 hosted services that you could potentially use instead. But basically, this is the hub where I log into and then subscribe to all of my RSS feeds.

• 8:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. 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 want to get good feeds, set them up, get them dialed. People wondering why these things might be paid services. Like you mentioned, 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. That's not free. And if you're self-hosting it, yeah, you're essentially, whatever you're hosting it is bandwidth costs on your end or anything like that, which probably isn't going to hurt you. But if it's another server out there, somebody's got to pay for that server and its process and stuff like that.

• 9:39Scott Tolinski?

  So that totally makes sense. I do wonder, after looking at all of, 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.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 9:56Scott Tolinski?

  But it's probably an iceberg of like... Getting it to be an actual nice product beyond just looking nice.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:10Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  So you could essentially build just a client app that looks good, but just talks to their API or pulls from their XML feed. So that's definitely a possibility. And a lot of these apps like Miniflux and Fresh RSS, they have community plugins 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 $3 a month or a $1 a month VPS.

• 10:43Scott Tolinski?

  Or Synology or something.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. You could run it, you could like self-host it at home with Synology. These are very low resource servers if you want to, if you want to host them yourself.

• 10:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, again, the reason why a service would cost money is because if you've got a lot of people on here, yeah, it would add up, yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  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 mode. Second of all, being overrun with ads. Third of all, having to scroll through nonsense to get to the actual contents. So basically, the, I, the, the modern web aggravates me. But one of the cool things about RSS readers and specifically with Miniflux, 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 text itself. And that means that I can actually, but once I've synced with my server on my mobile phone,

• 11:44Speaker 01

  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. My server does the hard work of like pulling down the contents. And then if I want to go off to the blog, I can do that myself. But first I can decide by like, uh, 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.

• 12:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do appreciate that. You know what I would even like would be just like, uh, somebody does this, I forget who, but just, um, just a play button at the top to just read it in a nice voice.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'll talk about 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 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 basically knows when new articles are published or new news is published on any one of these feeds. On mobile, I use an app called Cappy Reader, like C-A-P-Y Reader. It's for Android. But the thing about Cappy 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.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  So any app that could talk to the Google Feed Reader interface can talk to this Miniflux instance. So I'm using Cappy Reader on my phone and then on desktop, I'm using an app called ReadKit for macOS. It's actually a paid app. 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 is 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,

• 13:58Speaker 01

  I have a setting which is just "Mark as read on scroll." So if I scroll past an article, that means the title wasn't interesting enough for me to click on it. And so now it's just marked as read and I'm never going to 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 side I use it on, it's always going to show me just my unread articles that I haven't read yet.

• 14:22Scott Tolinski?

  So you have, you're running these off of a Miniflux server, right, you said?

• 14:28Speaker 01

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

• 14:35Scott Tolinski?

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

• 14:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:50Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  But the way that I'm connecting to it is with the Google Reader API.

• 14:54Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, okay, cool. This all sounds very doable to me. I know I'm going to go down a rabbit hole of trying to make my own client now. You know, that would be a fun exercise anyways, and maybe I'll make a video on it. I do feel like, was it Cappy? What was it called? Cappy?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Cappy Reader, yeah, like a Cappy Bar.

• 15:32Scott Tolinski?

  Cappy? Yeah, Cappy, yeah. I understood that it was Cappy Bar instantly, but I did feel like the title's a little bit too close to Crappy Reader.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Oh, true.

• 15:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but no, it looks like a neat solution there. I like that.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  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 want to do, is AI summaries of these articles.

• 15:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I'm already fetching the contents. I could use AI to generate summaries and then decide if, better decide if I want to read these articles or if I want to save them for later. I did come across a Miniflux plugin 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.

• 16:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, discovery.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, discovery for making an app that works that way, but off of 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 want to come back to it later. There is a save button that basically corresponds to the API and then marks it as a saved article. But I also have an integration with another self-hosted service called Wallabag, which is a read later server.

• 17:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  So you might have heard of Pocket, which is-

• 17:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, used Pocket, yes.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And 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 full contents as well.

• 17:42Scott Tolinski?

  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 MyMind.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  MyMind.

• 17:58Scott Tolinski?

  And it's not necessarily made for that. This is more of like 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 MyMind, 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 a pretty beautiful app. But yeah, definitely not a true Pocket replacement, just good for collecting things.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Nice. And a similar idea with Miniflux, Wallabag is super low resource. 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 read stuff later.

• 18:50Scott Tolinski?

  Nice. Hell, yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  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 kind of updates that they make.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So any website or any blog typically is going to have an RSS feed available. The cool thing about Miniflux 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 atom in the response, and then figure out what that URL is. Or sometimes it will even try all of the common paths. Because a lot of times website.com/feed or website.com/atom, atom.xml, these are like common paths. So it'll go off and figure out where the feed is actually, if one exists, and then it'll automatically add it for you.

• 20:19Scott Tolinski?

  I would have to imagine there's a Chrome extension that would just pull something like that automatically for you, too.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Definitely. I will say, if you've ever seen the RSS icon, like just go to Wikipedia and look for what the RSS icon looks like.

• 20:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  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 going to start pulling in updates from those sites.

• 20:46Scott Tolinski?

  Unless it was a purchased template that they never pasted the link in. Those are abundant sometimes. I remember that classic orange, that classic orange pixelated little web 2.0 style RSS icon.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. Honestly, this kind of gets to the pain point 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 Linsley, his personal blog, "I tried to subscribe to the RSS feed and the RSS feed doesn't exist anymore." I think if you-

• 21:27Scott Tolinski?

  Tanner on blast here.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Tanner, well, it's just the example that came to mind. Uh, let me see if it's in here. Yeah, so if you-

• 21:33Scott Tolinski?

  CJ slams Tanner Linsley for his broken RSS feed.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you look in the source for tannerlinsley.com, there is a link with a type of application slash RSS plus XML. It links to slash feed dot XML. But if you go there, you get a 404 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 plugin, 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 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.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  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, yes. Uh, brutalist dot report. I will say, if you've listened to this whole episode and now you're turned off to like, I don't want to set up an RSS feed, but maybe you do want like minimalist news. Check out brutalist dot 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 dot report

• 23:03Speaker 01

  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, Ars Technica, The Register, and then there are some-

• 23:27Speaker 01

  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 instead of every single article being published by BBC, it's a feed of only the ones that are related to tech.

• 23:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and 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 is to look at the comments. It's like, bro, why am I doing this? 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 such a hard thing to resist. It's such a hard thing to resist.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and I haven't mentioned it yet.

• 24:09Scott Tolinski?

  That alone would make me do this, yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  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 want it out. I don't want to see it anymore. I just want to see the article. I can have my own opinions about it. And if I really want to dig deeper and know what other people are thinking about it, I can potentially find it on Reddit or Hacker News or whatever else. So this is one of the reasons why I did this is because I want to get my news from the source and not have to wait for somebody to submit it to Reddit.

• 24:55Scott Tolinski?

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

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:06Scott Tolinski?

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

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 25:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Glad to hear it. 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 upvoted articles that are being posted on Hacker News in my feed as well.

• 25:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, cool. Hell yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lastly is, I mentioned it earlier, but you can actually pull in subreddits if you want to. So if you go to reddit.com/r/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.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:34Scott Tolinski?

  And you can just do that, folks. We have the ability.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, just write a serverless function. And I mean, I'm hosting it on Dino. 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 reason this is the case is because a lot of people have their personal websites as their username on Blue Sky. So like wesboss.com is Wes's username, or stolin.ski is Scott's username.

• 27:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And so what I did is I went and 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.

• 27:41Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  And one of the cool things about that is like, you might actually see these articles, because 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 posts in your RSS feed before you even see it resubmitted to Reddit or resubmitted to Hacker News. Sick.

• 28:00Scott Tolinski?

  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?" Uh, as a nerd myself, it is like, very, you know, sometimes when you like, don't get it, you can just like, look at it and be like, "Yeah, not for me." Uh, no, you've done a great job of really explaining the benefits here and why I might care. It feels ridiculous that I am just about 40 years old and I'm now like, "Huh, maybe I should give RSS a try," but, uh, that's, that's just how it works sometimes, I suppose.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Glad to hear it. Yeah.

• 28:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much for this. I, again, uh, really eye-opening and I loved all these tools. I, I can't wait to spend time creating my own client and, um, abandoning it two months later, but that's how it goes. Uh, folks, if, 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 Code 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. Uh, we also do video episodes of every single one of these podcasts. If you care to see any of us enunciating or, uh, showing our, our screen on, on camera

• 29:17Scott Tolinski?

  every once in a while and all that stuff. Check us out, youtube.com/AtSyntaxFM and you can find us there. CJ, anything else to say before we get out of here?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  That's all I got, but break yourself from the chains of Reddit and make your own RSS server. So, yeah.

• 29:31Scott Tolinski?

  I'm, I'm ready. I'm ready. All right, cool. We'll catch you guys later. Peace.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Peace.