I’ve been using RSS readers for close to 20 years. It’s the only way I consume any writing these days. If there is no RSS feed for a website, it might as well not exist. If there is, and the topic is interesting to me, there is a high chance I have it in my list. There are, after all, around 1300 websites I subscribe to.

Same! Only a little less than 20 years, and I thought my ~300 feeds were overkill.

Originally, I wanted to build a theme for FreshRSS, but realized that what I wanted to achieve was not really doable. It was like putting lipstick on a pig. You could change some colors, but not the layout. So instead, I built a frontend that uses FreshRSS as the backend. It’s called Paper.

I did something really similar. Only instead of FreshRSS and Kirby, I’m using Miniflux and Hugo, with the source on GitHub and deployment handled by Vercel. I call mine Radar.

It’s the whole backend to this blog!

I post a lot of links, so I set everything up so I can just grab any story out of my RSS feed, use the default headline or write my own, and then add commentary and tags.

I added in a really simple markdown editor and it’s perfect for me.

We are in the age of endlessly personalized apps that anyone with a little understanding of programming can create.