RSS Server Side Reader

https://matklad.github.io/2025/06/26/rssssr.html

30•Bogdanp•4h ago

Comments

quaintdev•1h ago

I read the entire article and I still have no idea what author was trying to achieve.

onli•1h ago

Instead of a regular RSS reader he wanted to only get a notification when some target sites have new entries. He opted to implement an expanded blogroll, one that also shows the last three entries.

ehutch79•1h ago

I feel like per site notifications, or muting low priority feeds, should be table stakes?

geoffeg•1h ago

I love that we're rediscovering server side rendering. It's impressive to me how quickly the industry moved away from it as the default and is now an interesting, new technique to many.

rglullis•1h ago

Except this has nothing to do with Server side rendering.

timothyisonline•57m ago

What makes you say this? A server is rendering/outputting HTML as output from a GitHub action that builds via Deno.

Did you think your browser was assembling the HTML?

DannyPage•1h ago

Interesting idea, but it mentions the idea of notifications. Is the notification when happens to be new article is at the top on the page? Or is there an external service he forgot to metnion?

rglullis•1h ago

Tell me you are JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel, without telling me you are a JavaScript developer who likes to reinvent the wheel:

- "RSS is for notifications". No, it's for content syndication. It is right there in the name.

- "XML is complicated, JSON Feed is better". Oh, dear Lord, forgive him for he has no idea what he is saying.

- "Lets ignore all the gazillion libraries for and tools for parsing and processing OPML, Atom and XML so that we can build a system that depends on deno a f*cking GitHub actions"

timeon•17m ago

AFAIK author is not JavaScript developer.

dqv•7m ago

Did you ask AI to make a roast? I'm genuinely asking.

It looks sensible to me. He's using two tools he was already using: Deno and GitHub. And he's using this RSS library: https://deno.land/x/rss@1.1.2

And he can always run that command without GitHub Actions if necessary or desired.

p0w3n3d•1h ago

I remember using RSS heavily around 2007-2013 but is this still a thing?

galleywest200•1h ago

I use RSS very frequently, it is often how I get my daily news.

Most blogs, at least in the tech space, have it. As well any major news publication worth their salt will have an RSS feed still.

pwenzel•1h ago

Heck yeah! I use an RSS reader to consume news every day on both my phone and laptop. It's blissfully free of extras and distraction.

jasonfrost•1h ago

Using rn to access HN

quantadev•59m ago

Definitely! Advertisers hate it, because it's a way of basically bypassing ADs. I used to have my own RSS reader doing what the OP's doing, but I finally just started using Liferea (on Linux) which I love. There's a file format for sharing links called "opml", and here's mine for example (below). Many RSS readers can import/export your list of links to this format.

Each day there's about 150 new articles to scroll thru. What we need in the world however is some sort of OPML Sharing social media service where people can share their FAVs. It's a shame news sites are heading in the opposite direction with closed paywalls rather than openness, but I guess they're struggling to pay the bills. My apologies for posting such a big chunk of text and eating up half your screen. I only do this when I'm pretty sure it's relevant.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Liferea Feed List Export</title> </head> <body> <outline title="Example Feeds" text="Example Feeds" description="Example Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="News" text="News" description="News" type="folder"> <outline title="Ars Technica" text="Ars Technica" description="Ars Technica" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index" htmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com"/> <outline title="Slashdot" text="Slashdot" description="Slashdot" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain" htmlUrl="https://slashdot.org/"/> <outline title="BBC" text="BBC" description="BBC" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=int" htmlUrl="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news"/> <outline title="Science" text="Science" description="Science" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.sciencenews.org/feed" htmlUrl="https://www.sciencenews.org"/> </outline> <outline title="Knowledge" text="Knowledge" description="Knowledge" type="folder"> <outline title="Aeon" text="Aeon" description="Aeon" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://aeon.co/feed.rss" htmlUrl="https://aeon.co"/> <outline title="Quanta Magazine" text="Quanta Magazine" description="Quanta Magazine" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.quantamagazine.org"/> </outline> <outline title="Open Source" text="Open Source" description="Open Source" type="folder"> <outline title="Planet Debian" text="Planet Debian" description="Planet Debian" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml" htmlUrl="https://planet.debian.org/"/> <outline title="Liferea Blog" text="Liferea Blog" description="Liferea Blog" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://feeds.feedburner.com/LifereaBlog" htmlUrl="https://lzone.de/liferea/blog/"/> <outline title="Planet GNOME" text="Planet GNOME" description="Planet GNOME" xmlUrl="https://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml" htmlUrl=""/> </outline> <outline title="My Feeds" text="My Feeds" description="My Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="My RSS Feeds" text="My RSS Feeds" description="My RSS Feeds" type="folder"> <outline title="The New Stack" text="The New Stack" description="The New Stack" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://thenewstack.io/feed/" htmlUrl="https://thenewstack.io/"/> <outline title="Daily Sceptic" text="Daily Sceptic" description="Daily Sceptic" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://dailysceptic.org/feed/" htmlUrl="https://dailysceptic.org/"/> <outline title="Martin Fowler" text="Martin Fowler" description="Martin Fowler" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://martinfowler.com/feed.atom" htmlUrl="https://martinfowler.com"/> <outline title="Slashdot" text="Slashdot" description="Slashdot" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain" htmlUrl="https://slashdot.org/"/> <outline title="Science Daily" text="Science Daily" description="Science Daily" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.sciencedaily.com/rss/all.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/"/> <outline title="Hackernoon" text="Hackernoon" description="Hackernoon" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://hackernoon.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://hackernoon.com"/> <outline title="RealClearDefense" text="RealClearDefense" description="RealClearDefense" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/index.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles"/> <outline title="Mozilla Hacks" text="Mozilla Hacks" description="Mozilla Hacks" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://hacks.mozilla.org/feed/" htmlUrl="https://hacks.mozilla.org/"/> <outline title="Hollywood in Toto" text="Hollywood in Toto" description="Hollywood in Toto" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/"/> <outline title="David Walsh Blog" text="David Walsh Blog" description="David Walsh Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://davidwalsh.name/feed" htmlUrl="https://davidwalsh.name"/> <outline title="Bongino Report" text="Bongino Report" description="Bongino Report" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://bonginoreport.com/feed" htmlUrl=""/> <outline title="Lifehacker" text="Lifehacker" description="Lifehacker" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://lifehacker.com/rss" htmlUrl="https://lifehacker.com/feed/rss"/> <outline title="Defence Blog" text="Defence Blog" description="Defence Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://defence-blog.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://defence-blog.com"/> <outline title="The Cipher Brief" text="The Cipher Brief" description="The Cipher Brief" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://www.thecipherbrief.com/"/> <outline title="Reddit - World News" text="Reddit - World News" description="Reddit - World News" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss" htmlUrl="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/"/> <outline title="NPR World" text="NPR World" description="NPR World" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.npr.org/1004/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1004"/> <outline title="Brookings - International Affairs" text="Brookings - International Affairs" description="Brookings - International Affairs" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.brookings.edu/feed/" htmlUrl=""/> <outline title="Patriot Rising" text="Patriot Rising" description="Patriot Rising" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://patriotrising.com/feed/" htmlUrl=""/> <outline title="The Verge" text="The Verge" description="The Verge" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.theverge.com"/> <outline title="USNI News" text="USNI News" description="USNI News" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://news.usni.org/feed" htmlUrl="https://news.usni.org/"/> <outline title="Simon Willison's Weblog" text="Simon Willison's Weblog" description="Simon Willison's Weblog" type="atom" xmlUrl="https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/" htmlUrl="http://simonwillison.net/"/> </outline> </outline> </outline> </body> </opml>

busymom0•43m ago

I feel like you should post that on pastebin or something instead of posting such a huge piece of XML in a comment.

PaulHoule•20m ago

My YOShINon RSS reader incorporates about 110 feeds, and, unlike the majority of RSS readers, actually treats RSS feed items as items that are stored in a database so it can present those items in various ways. Most news sources ranging from The Guardian and The Bulwark and Jacobin as well as phys.org and MDPI publishing still have RSS feeds.

It has screens to view things based on database queries, full text, and embedding similarities but the main UI looks like TikTok or Tinder for text, showing me articles it thinks I will like mixed with random articles to keep it calibrated. It spins like a top. I also have another thing called "Fraxinus" which was a cut-and-paste job from it that works as a bookmark manager and image sorter, the plan eventually is to mash them back together.

drukenemo•16m ago

It sounds interesting. Is it available for download?

AndyKelley•1h ago

HN seems to be having trouble understanding why this is brilliant.

Ignore the parts about JSON/XML. That's irrelevant.

Problem: you want an RSS reader, but RSS readers are annoying because they are stateful and you have to try to sync them across devices. Or, as in the case of Google Reader they may be discontinued. Best case, you have a dependency on a third party application.

Solution: make a web page on your personal site that aggregates links from your RSS feeds.

This is handy because you can now simply access your own web site as an RSS reader. As a side benefit, you can share this page with your friends to help them find nice links, and help promote stuff that you like to search engines.

ImPostingOnHN•1h ago

Problem: you want to read your RSS feeds, but you aren't online.

Solution: use something like The Old Reader, which aggregates online, and can also be synced with an app like GReader for offline reading.

graemep•30m ago

When are you ever offline these days though?

microflash•26m ago

Yup. I’ve been using Miniflux for this for a while.

PaulHoule•18m ago

Never mind the fact that desktop apps for the birds. Microsoft won't even tell you what widget set to use post the failure of Metro, "use Electron" seems about as official as anything else.

From day one I planned to use my RSS reader on both desktop computers and a tablet (via Tailscale) and when I got a Meta Quest 3 I found it worked great on that although enlarging touch target to the AAA standard helped a lot.

tolerance•53m ago

It looks like Dave Winer built something similar.

https://blogroll.social

http://scripting.com/2014/06/02/whatIsARiverOfNewsAggregator...

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