ndza

Must-read section

I love RSS feeds!

I've been subscribed to RSS/Atom feeds for decades now. It's a great way to keep on top of new content to read. I've been through several readers, starting with Google Reader way back, then following its shutdown, Feedly, and later Inoreader - which I've been using for a while. I'm sure there are many more out there I should probably try.

Over the years, I've come across some great reading content this way, which I would have liked to share, but haven't. So, creating a new Must-read section for this seemed appropriate.

What do I need

I wanted to call this a "Blogroll" - but that actually means a curated list of nice websites - not individual links pointing to articles, posts, good-reading and so on. So, after some thinking I went with "Must-read" instead.

Curating a list and creating a feed

Then I thought about my workflow a bit. I usually find good content to read through Inoreader or other ways. I need a way to save that link, kinda like a bookmark, then a way to have some feed generation from a collection of such bookmarks. So, I looked up platforms that allow me to save links, creating a collection through tagging or folders, and then have available through a feed. I found Raindrop.io, Instapaper and Inoreader that can do it too. I went with Instapaper - just for the sheer pleasure of trying out a new platform.

With this, I can now simply save a link from my phone or laptop browser and tag it. And have a public feed based on the tag. To test, I even subscribed to that Instapaper feed from my Inoreader, and made sure it works.

Building the functionality

I can make the page render the feed through a bit of JavaScript. SOP gets in the way, so I need some sort of CORS proxy. I chose to host that proxy as a worker in Cloudflare. Of course, all this was pretty easy to implement with claude by my side.

So, now the my feed from Instapaper gets is delivered on my page, and there's even an RSS feed of it. I could just share my Instapaper feed, but what would be the fun in that. Plus, what if I move to some other feed provider.

Bye!