Introduction
RSS has always interested me in a morbid curiosity kind of way. I've taken a stab at it in the past. Mainly just with dev blogs of people I like but nothing has really kept me there. It's not something that I checked every day so eventually it became an out of site out of mind scenario. Recently though Reddit has announced their new API changes and pricing. Which is more or less going to shut down every 3rd party app on the market and you won't catch me dead using the official one. It's slow, ugly, and navigating it is an absolute nightmare. This is the moment RSS slid back into my life.
All subreddits have an RSS feed. Seeing as how I browse Reddit by visiting specific subreddits this worked out perfectly. All you have to do is take your favorite subreddit and add a ".rss" to the end of it. Boom now you can drop it in your favorite RSS reader.
The Stack
Now I'm a self hosted software kind of guy. If I don't have to spend money on something I usually won't. There's a Lenovo Thinkcentre sitting under my tv and I thought to myself "alright let's see what we can do here". Could I use something like feedly? Yes! Would it be anywhere near as fun? Not at all. So here's a run down of the stack I went about using for this it's nothing crazy.
- FreshRSS - This allows me to manage and sync my RSS feeds and read status between devices. This comes in handy as I use a laptop as well.
- NetNewsWire - Absolute gem of an app. It's free, looks nice, and truly feels like a native app
- Tailscale - Let's me use all my self hosted stuff from anywhere. It allows me to talk to FreshRSS even when I'm not at home.
FreshRSS
Setting up FreshRSS is easy. The best way to do it is using the linuxserver.io container. Follow those instructions to get it setup. There's a couple things you need to configure first before you can use it with NetNewsWire. First you have to turn on "Enable api access". You can find the option for it under settings -> administration -> authentication.
Then you need to go to Profile and set an API password. IMPORTANT: The password you set here is the one you'll be using on the mobile app not the password you set for the web interface. The password for the web interface will not allow you to login.
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader I've tried out. Getting it connected to FreshRSS was real easy. It's under the connections screen. Like I said before though make sure you use your api key that you set and not your web interface password. Your username will be the same as your web interface one though. It's a little confusing to setup but not bad.
Reddit RSS Feeds
Reddit rss feeds are easy to setup all you have to do is add '.rss' to the end of the url for the subreddit you want.
https://reddit.com/r/homelab.rss
I throw all the subreddits I regularly visit into a folder labeled 'reddit'. That way you can kinda browse reddit without using the awful mobile app. The odds that the RSS feeds stay around especially with the API changes coming up is slim. We'll have to wait and see what happens.
Closing Thoughts
RSS is super simple to use. Whether you have one source or 100 this setup should last you a while. If you're looking for a place to start you can take a peak at my opml file. It'll give you a good place to start!