RSS Feed Everything

Whenever I am in a busier period of my life (at this stage it can mostly be because of UNI / Internships / all the other extra activities that I am doing - freelancing, looking at you) I tend to fall into bad habits, like losing too much time on Facebook/TikTok (nothing worse) … this gets me to think about possible solutions that I would like to implement with the 1st occasion.

The issue that I wanna tackle now is that I spend too much time scrolling through nonsense pages (Instagram/FB/TikTok), I would like to surround myself with higher quality content (like I want to with people). At the same time, remembering where all the quality content is can be a hassle as I would need to manage bookmarks and constantly visit those sites from every device that I own.

RSS

…can solve this issue - I am not reinventing the wheel here, I know that RSS can feel old and maybe unfashionable, but in this case I believe it is going to solve my problem.

Infrastructure

Now, the question is … how can one turn this idea into a long-term setup? The features that I would like the product to have are:

  • organizing streams into categories
  • easy access streams from mobile/web
  • allow for more of a media-heavy content (videos/images)
  • be minimalistic

Solutions like Feedly basically contain everything that I could wish for. I would also pay the $10 per month to skip ads, have unlimited streams, and all the other fancier options, but I am a hacker, a builder at heart, so I want to try something else… like this:

FreshRSS/FreshRSS
A free, self-hostable aggregator…. Contribute to FreshRSS/FreshRSS development by creating an account on GitHub.

Currently, all my websites are hosted by a Digital Ocean Kubernetes Cluster, so if I Dockerize this app and write the necessary Kubernetes resource YAML files, I can easily deploy and start using it. Luckily, there is a Docker folder, which besides the Dockerfiles that I would need to build the images, contains also a docker-compose.yaml.

Eureka! I am gonna use Kompose, more specifically:

kompose convert

…which directly results in the Kubernetes resources file needed. (more info regarding the Kubernetes resources)

At this point, I only need to fine-tune the generated files to enclose everything into a dedicated namespace and create a new Ingress for the subdomain that is going to host this service (https://rss.sorinmircea.com/).

SSL certificates are auto-generated by a Cert Manager.

You can view the final configuration files, that bring everything to life here:

msorins/FreshRSS
rss.sorinmircea.com. Contribute to msorins/FreshRSS development by creating an account on GitHub.

Results

FreshRSS login screen

FreshRSS subscription management

FreshRSS articles

FreshRSS categories

From my browser, I can view the feed directly from https://rss.sorinmircea.com/.

On my Android phone, I have installed Readrops which seems to do the job perfectly.