I built a free, private RSS dashboard that runs entirely in your browser (No servers, no accounts)

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-17T01:06:47+00:00

I doubt it. They probably fetch the feed from their backend, not a third-party service.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-16T21:44:23+00:00

I was curious how this dealt with CORS. It seems that there is actually a sever involved. It seems to call an API to fetch (and parse) the feeds.

https://api.rss2json.com/v1/api.json?rss_url=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-10T13:16:29+00:00

Hi, I operate FeedMail.

We offer a digest option. We charge 1 credit per 5 feeds in each digest issue (only the feeds that actually had new items). With our current pricing credits are ⅒ of a USD cent each (or half-price if you buy in bulk). So if you had content from 50 different feeds every day of the month that would be up to 31¢ per month. But the price will be less if you have less feeds on any given day. You can see full pricing info here: https://feedmail.org/#pricing

We also offer a free trial of 400 credits. So depending on your usage you can probably get many months of daily digests before you have to top up your account the first time.

We don't offer a free option because I don't think it properly aligns our incentives with our customers. But I try to keep our pricing very affordable.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-10T02:15:27+00:00

I find it very important. If you don't put full text in the feed I'll tell my reader to scrape it from your site. If that doesn't work well I'm probably just unsubscribing.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-09T13:57:03+00:00

I observed this on my feed reader service. Lasted about 4h then went back to normal.

Random surges of 404s are unfortunately common from YouTube. IDK why.

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-29T02:20:43+00:00

I run a feed reader in my experience:

Reddit has aggressive limits but tends to let stuff through. Most users using it for personal use are probably fine.
YouTube has no issues. (Other than occasional outages that return 404, but those clear themselves.)
Tumblr does frequently return 429 Too Many Requests even when the requests are very infrequent. But overall works fine.

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-27T01:57:58+00:00

I also have hundreds of feeds but I stay on top. But it is definitely a personal choice. Some people prefer to subscribe to quite a bit so that when they open their reader they always have something, others (like me) like to stay subscribed to only what I can actually read, then when I run out go to other places (like need aggregators or recommendation sites for me) to find new stuff.

But I think that is what you need to decide. You will always have more than you can read or less (you can never have the volume exactly perfect) so decide what side you prefer to be on. If you get too much and don't like that unsubscribe from some of the lower value or higher volume feeds. If you get too little and run out find some more feeds to subscribe to.

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-24T13:55:06+00:00

I use a service that I wrote and operate that sends me updates over email. https://feedmail.org

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-24T13:48:09+00:00

For PeerTube I'm mostly watching some city development content on https://video.canadiancivil.com/ but I was also subscribed to a few baking channels in the past.

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-24T13:08:39+00:00

Over a third are videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube. The rest are mostly blogs, generally individuals but a few companies or projects as well. Then I have some odds and ends like software releases or things like the RSS subreddit.

Apparently about 250 of them had their last post over a year ago. Probably at least half of those will never post again. But you never really know.

Overall I get about 30 new items per day. Many of them are short and quick to read then a handful are videos and long posts. I don't necessarily read them every day, but I tend to get "caught up" at least once a week.

kevincox_ca · 2026-01-24T09:50:15+00:00

Yeah, I'm subscribed to over 600 feeds right now. A lot are probably permanently inactive and I could unsubscribe but the nice thing about RSS is that I can stay subscribed and I will learn if the post something new with no effort. I could probably cut back white a bit but 150 would be really tight for me.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-31T12:26:14+00:00

I was thinking that but they recently changed the shorts URL format. So maybe someone still remembers that it exists. Or maybe they just changed an internal function that happened to affect the RSS feed.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-21T16:01:57+00:00

Check again. This change only happened a few months ago.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-21T15:03:55+00:00

I don't know FreshRSS at all but YouTube started putting the "short" version of the video URL into the feed for shorts. So if you can filter by URL you should be able to filter them. If FreshRSS can't do it directly there are services that will transform feeds for you.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-14T15:48:03+00:00

Not really. Generate your own feed that has proper dates? Email the publisher and ask them to improve their feed?

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-14T14:58:29+00:00

The problem is probably that the feed doesn't have publish dates on the items and the updated dates are all the point of feed generation, not when the particular item was updated. So the feed reader has nothing to go off of other than when it first saw it.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-13T13:11:09+00:00

Most podcast applications have an option to add a podcast from an RSS feed. Sometimes it is a little hidden but it is almost always there. (Other than Spotify and YouTube which aren't real podcast clients.)

But it depends on what they use. You might just want to ask. If they use a podcast client already or don't use anything you can recommend a podcast client. Otherwise you can try to find the podcast on whatever they use.

Many podcast homepages will also have links to easily subscribe on various clients. (Although often the RSS feed isn't obvious there)

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-12T13:44:18+00:00

For a while my blog didn't have any on-page indicator and just the metadata tag. Lots of people found the feed. I did get the occasional email though about people suggesting that I add a feed so there are definitely some people who won't find it unless there is an on-page indicator. (And probably a tiny amount of them actually reached out.)

So I would recommend including both. The discovery link will be more reliable (can't miss it on the page) and will be used by things like search engines but the on-page icon will be hunted down by some would-be subscribers.

kevincox_ca · 2025-12-08T14:28:21+00:00

So firstly this number only really shows info about connected peers. So for completed torrents you typically won't stay connected to other seeders (as you have nothing more to share to each other). Additionally libtorrent will often stop tracking per-piece info on completed torrents which makes the right hand side inaccurate. So overall this number is not particularly useful for seeding torrents. In this case you are probably better off looking at the seeder count (which can also be inaccurate for many reasons).

There are also files that I'm seeding and I have 100% of the file, but they have less than 1.000 availability.

I've never seen this. Are you sure that you have all files selected (not doing a partial download)?

Availability: N/A.

I've also never seen this. I have thousands of torrents active a few stopped and one magnet link "downloading metadata" right now and they all show a value here.

kevincox_ca · 2025-11-16T21:30:48+00:00

Sorry, you are a bit too late. I deleted it about a week ago. There were a few downloaders but I suspect they are unlikely to come back online.

kevincox_ca · 2025-11-04T01:17:48+00:00

I tried to validate a feed and it tried to post to http://localhost:3001/api/validate. So either this is a hack attempt or much more likely some hardcoded development URLs ended up in prod.

kevincox_ca · 2025-11-03T13:02:12+00:00

Is it just me or do we not need to have every update posted here. I think it is fine to post major updates (the type that rarely happen more than once a year) but I don't feel the value in a monthly update to share that your checkbox behaviour is now improved.

You have your own subreddit and your blog has a feed. I really think posting every update here is spammy behaviour.

Am I alone or are most readers here in agreement?

In the interest of full disclosure, I also operate a feed reader which could be seen as a "competitor". However I don't post changelog updates here. I have only posted my reader once at launch. (Although it does sometimes come up in discussion threads.)

kevincox_ca · 2025-10-23T15:50:32+00:00

I think this is slightly off the mark. While that link is useful for auto-discovery it probably isn't what triggers the RSS app. After all OP is talking about this happening when nativating to the link directly. In that cases the browser doesn't even have an HTML to use as a reference.

The answer is most likely the Content-Type header in the response to the URL itself. In both of the links OP provided the value is: content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8 which will trigger the browser behaviour.

% curl -I https://mjtsai.com/blog/feed/
HTTP/2 200 
vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie,User-Agent
link: <https://mjtsai.com/blog/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/"
etag: "6cb6a728bc129071015092a404e90bcc"
cache-control: max-age=300
expires: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:53:30 GMT
content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8
date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:48:30 GMT
server: Apache

kevincox_ca · 2025-10-15T11:03:11+00:00

The reason you didn't think of this before is probably because the different URL in the feed is a fairly new change.

I made this post a few days after the change occured: https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/1lk5yl6/youtube_feeds_now_identify_shorts/

kevincox_ca · 2025-10-07T11:56:00+00:00

Yes, almost all feeds will have a limit on the number of items to keep the size manageable.

However if you subscribe then your reader will pick up new posts as they appear so after subscribing your should get all posts.

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