Create Your Own RSS Reader

Dr. Drang:

My subscription to my current RSS service is running out in a month or so, and as I considered which provider I wanted to use for the next year, I began to wonder if I’d be satisfied with any of them. How hard would it be for me to make my own service that always serves updated versions of the most recent articles on the sites I subscribe to? After all, RSS is a distributed protocol. Just because we’ve all gotten used to accessing it through centralized services, that doesn’t mean we have to.

So I wrote a short script that goes through my subscriptions, plucks out the articles published (or updated) today, and creates a simple web page with all of them displayed in reverse chronological order.

You can view the code on Dr. Drang’s site if you’re interested in running something similar. I’m using Feedly — I got the lifetime Pro subscription — and I don’t plan on switching any time soon.