| New anon account so I can speak openly about the future. My jaw is on the floor because this post seems like it could have been written by my future self. I can’t believe how much in common I have with the author. I’ve realized I’m burnt out and have been planning to quit my job early next year (wanting to state this is the reason for the anon account). But there’s a lot of people who are probably feeling this same way. What’s astonishing to me is what the author did is almost exactly what I’ve been daydreaming about doing in my time off. I’ve also been thinking about the open/IndieWeb and how I’d like to engage with it. I was planning to build some sort of app to experiment in this space. There are similarities even down to one of the specific problems in this space: how to prevent infrequent posts from being lost in the flood. And technical considerations: what languages and technologies to use. I had also been considering building something using modern web technologies, where I’m about 10 years out of date on web development. In some ways, I’m delighted there’s another person out there to provide some validation to what I’ve been thinking and feeling recently. It makes me feel like I’m going to head down the right path. In other ways, I’m upset and jealous the author got there first. |
If it makes you feel better (or worse?) I wrote something very similar to this 20 years ago and still use it every day. I wanted my own RSS reader back then, hated all the ones I saw and wanted one that looked like a normal blog (not inbox, similar to OP's requirements) that I could design however I wanted. So I basically wrote an RSS feed parser to give me everything and designed it to look like my normal blog does.
That got modified to going to grab the full article if the RSS feed only had blurbs. I didn't want to have to click outside my reader to view the full post, I wanted everything in my feed reader. Since I had a basic page scraper, I used that for other sites that didn't have RSS feeds, this helped a lot when social media became popular so I never had to actually go to any social media sites at all. I could just stay in my own feed with the content I wanted (I was never really into social media anyway).
And as you can imagine, it being 20 years old means it's written in old tech, PHP and XSLT, because that's what I was writing 20 years ago. And it's still written in that.
In any case I highly suggest making your own. It's a fun project. Sure mine is crufty and old and sometimes doesn't generate the right content I want (scraping is fairly imperfect), but it's mine and it's been my daily reader for 20 years and I love it.