Ever since Google discontinued its Reader app 2013, I’ve been using Feedly as an RSS aggregator. I’ve had no problems with Feedly: the app and browser versions work well, good interface, minimal ads, they’re not pushy with their enhancements. Despite all of that, and in an effort to find out where I can dogfood icecream* a little more, I explored options for self-hosted RSS aggregators.
At first, I wanted something without a database. I copy/paste URLs for interesting stories I want to save into Google Calendar, and I don’t necessarily need the read/unread status of feeds to be tracked; just display the latest fifty or one hundred entries for all my feeds. JQuery and a plugin or two would make processing feeds pretty easy, but most of the examples I found involved showing a feed from only one URL. With some effort I could figure out how to simply process an array of feed URLs and list them out in chronological order, but I want to be super lazy efficient and limit the need to customize where I can.
FeedEk looked promising, but it needs some further development. It had trouble finding feeds from source when it’s not the direct feed URL. Feedly and a lot of RSS reader software can look for feeds from just a domain or inexact URL (like jaydinitto.com), but FeedEk needed the exact URL (jaydinitto.com/feed). I have my reader pointed to a lot of YouTube channels, and FeedEk couldn’t sus out feeds. Of course, it doesn’t help that YouTube makes it difficult to find the real feed URL; I don’t even know if they even provide one. So FeedEk was out. On a side note: Odysee, a YouTube alternative, actually has the RSS feed URL in their channels’ options.
So I poked around for RSS software to install via my hosting provider, Bluehost. The options seemed okay, if not needlessly complicated, but most did not have a responsive design for mobile consumption…another good aspect of Feedly. Miniflux looked really good but there was a problem with installing it, so I abandoned that. Next up was FreshRSS, which had some weird bells and whistles, but a similar design to Feedly for both desktop and mobile.
Installation worked fine, set up and usage was mostly intuitive, and they had a nice dark theme. The filtering options when looking at your feeds could have been better designed, but I caught on quickly. Some of the messaging was not good. If you refresh your feeds to get any new articles, you get a misleading “There are no feeds to refresh” message, which makes no sense if you already have feeds you’re following. I would have said something more accurate, like: “You’re all caught up with your feeds.”
One nice little bit of messaging with FreshRSS that I’ve never seen with a reader is when there are new things to load, you get a message at the top with a running tally of all your feeds. Screenshot:
It’s a nice touch to see the app cycle through all your feed titles instead of displaying a standard loading spinner. No, I am not subscribed to pewdiepie.
I did some minor CSS to hide the options I would never use, or ones that I would set once and never change again, and the selected state of the filter buttons kinda sucked. I put a white border around the selected ones to make it much more clear.
Here’s the before, both desktop and mobile:
And the after. Yes, one side’s border is missing in these screens, but I fixed that with the handy border-collapse declaration. Remember, since I’m shooting for laziness efficiency here, I didn’t feel the need to take updated screenshots.
* I prefer the term “icecreaming” over “dogfooding” because of the context. I think I’m not a dog, so I’m not going to be eating a food for dogs even if I have a hand in making it myself. For health reasons I don’t really eat ice cream, but I’ll make a bold claim and say most folks, no matter their diet, find ice cream more appealing like I do.