💻 Feeds

I previously decided to use an app on my computer to subscribe to RSS feeds with the intent of logging on once a week or so to read any posts. I kept not doing this, so I decided to create my own tool. This is a feed reader that generates HTML files of the post contents.

This is by no means top quality coding, it was thrown together to solve a problem.

This requires PHP and python to run.

Source code: https://github.com/0xdstn/feeds

Setup

Place the contents of the repo in a directory called feeds inside your root web directory (such as /var/www/html/feeds).

Create a key.txt file one directory up from your root web directory (such as /var/www). This should not be accessible via a browser.

Create an articles directory in the feeds directory.

Create a data.txt file and a feeds.txt file in the feeds directory.

Set up a cron job for the scraper. I have it set up to run every hour like so:

0 * * * * cd /var/www/html/feeds && ./scrape.py >/dev/null 2>&1

The cron job loops through and pulls the feeds in feeds.txt, adds it to the list in data.txt, and generates an HTML file of the contents in the articles directory.

Usage

Navigating to the /feeds?key=YOURKEY directory on your webserver will display a list of articles from data.txt. Replace YOURKEY with the contents of the key.txt file. If the articles have been added, it will display the titles and link to the local HTML file for it.

You can subscribe to a feed by clicking Add feed, which will give you a box to fill in a URL and a submit button. This adds the provided URL to feeds.txt.

When reading an article, there is a mark read link at the top and bottom which you can click to mark it as read, removing it from the list on the index page.

This app is really light weight, so it works well in the web browser of a kindle.

👋 Hey! Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about this post, or anything else, I'd love to chat! You can find the best way to contact me on my hello page or send me an email.