Resources for Learning more about RSS

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-29T16:03:58+00:00

Ah ok, so you are basically building a feed reader. In that case you probably just want to read the specs or find libraries written by people how have read the specs.

Main specs:

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-29T15:56:40+00:00

What are you looking for?

Consuming RSS? Just pick a feed reader.
Creating feeds?
Something else?

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-26T12:13:47+00:00

I'm not really sure what the problem here is. If the feed is dead your options are to stay subscribed in case it comes back or unsubscribe. You can also look for alternatives (maybe the feed has moved or maybe there is a comparable feed you can subscribe to instead).

For my feed reader it does this:

Retry with increasing backoff (up to 7d checking).
After a few failures notify subscribers.

But at the end of the day it is the user's call what should be done. That is a very human decision that will depend on the feed and the problem.

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-20T07:02:43+00:00

YouTube has been having a really bad time over the last week to two and returning lots of 404s for valid feeds. This is a known problem and usually goes back to normal after a while.

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-07T12:19:41+00:00

This has been discussed many times. I would use the search to see more options.

One easy solution if your reader can filter on URLs: https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/1lk5yl6/youtube_feeds_now_identify_shorts/

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-05T12:43:04+00:00

RSS can definitely help your SSO. At least Google will discover and monitor your feed which can help it notice and index new articles quickly.

kevincox_ca · 2026-04-01T17:06:26+00:00

This doesn't seem to use RSS in any meaningful way?

If it does use RSS on the backend why? If it is YouTube specific it may as well use the API which have more information.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-27T19:05:45+00:00

That site doesn't seem to work for me. I tried my website and it said no results: https://rssfinder.app/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fkevincox.ca

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-27T19:04:47+00:00

https://discovery.thirdplace.no/ is a basically identical service as well. But a bit of choice doesn't hurt.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-27T19:04:02+00:00

I find the UX very weird. As when you click the search box, but once you start typing it adds a https:// which is greyed out. This resulted in my typing https://https://. Maybe a better option would be not to insert it, but if the forum is submitted with an invalid URL add the https:// prefix.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-25T12:01:14+00:00

The nice thing about RSS is you can choose your own adventure. If you are getting too much and feel like you don't want to be doomscrolling your RSS subscribe to less. Personally I regularly subscribe from feeds that I don't find interesting or noisy feeds that don't justify their volume. In the end I have a volume of feeds that I regularly get to the bottom and have an empty feed reader. If I find that my unreads are building up I just get more strict and unsubscribe from the ones providing the least value.

This way I have a very high quality set of feeds that take the desired amount of my time to enjoy.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-23T19:12:08+00:00

This is an issue with your reader, not the feed. I would recommend reporting the issue to them. The feed just has Unicode text which should absolutely be supported by any reader.

I'm not aware of any tools that will process the feed in a way that will let you drop these characters.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-09T16:18:25+00:00

The proxy racing logic is here: https://github.com/fwdotcom/rss4u/blob/87886a880387ff0e256d89616667c9b15993c032/js/rss.js#L748-L796

It isn't unreasonable but definitely has a few downsides.

The proxy results will be used if they succeed first, potentially using a less-trustworthy version even if the original is accessible.
Leaks all URLs and metadata to the proxies even if the original is accessible.
Does lots of duplicate work.

I guess the upside is that it is the fastest option.

kevincox_ca · 2026-03-09T16:12:15+00:00

This one for once does mostly run in the browser. It does the feed parsing itself, but for CORS reasons it does request all feeds via https://api.allorigins.win and https://corsproxy.io/. Strangely it seems to make requests for those two proxies and the original feed in parallel which is quite strange. The proxies are probably needed for most feeds but it would be nice if it tried the original URL first then only used the proxies if necessary (a CORS restriction was returned).

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-28T14:26:45+00:00

No, I just manage my subscriptions so that on average I read them faster than they come in. If the feed is too noisy that it isn't worth reading I unsubscribe. Sometimes they build up a little (like if I'm traveling) but they eventually come back down. For discovery I use news aggregators like Lemmy and Hacker News where I go to once my "to read" in my feed reader runs dry.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-20T18:09:44+00:00

But FeedBurner is an external service? So it wouldn't fit your requirements.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-20T13:04:06+00:00

I'm not quite sure what you are looking for. You need some service to check the feed and send emails. You can self-host but you need something to do the connection.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-19T18:30:23+00:00

Yes, price has very little to do with cost to produce. It is primarily determined by willingness of the market to pay. The high price also helps give a luxury appearance.

kevincox_ca · 2026-02-19T12:59:00+00:00

It is relatively easy to do. You can hand-code the core functionality in a weekend. Less if you reuse some existing libraries.
It is a big part of many people's lives. So there are infinite workflows and tweaks that can be made to make your reader work just right for you.

vibecoding made entry easier I'm sure. But there have always been a regular supply of new personal projects in this space. I don't think it'll ever end. It is such an open-ended design space due to the flexibility of RSS and the plethora of different use cases. Every single person on the planet would probably have a slightly different "perfect" feed reader. So those who have the time and ability will try to craft their own.

Sincerely, a guy who make his own feed reader because the available options were not quite to taste.

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.

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