Mediocre Feed: My New Feed Reader
I've long since replaced all of my social media usage with an old-fashioned RSS feed. It takes a non-trivial time to amass a large enough collection of websites that you are both interested in and update semi-regularly, but after a few years it's pretty rare that I feel that I'm lacking.
My previous feed was (and still is) hosted publicly via a Github Action that my friend Marco set up. At periodic intervals it reads through a list of feed URLs in the repo and completely regenerates a simple homepage based on those.
Afaik I'm the only one who actually _reads_ Cryptic News, which is fine, but it leaves some features to be desired. For one it doesn't support gemini at all, and at this point I spend more than half of my "aimless internet reading" time on gemini. Second it's a bit of a pain to add new feeds to it, and the code in question is a bit picky with regards to what metadata it wants along with each feed.
Enter comitium, which I discovered via nytpu's comitium feed.
nytpu's comitium subscriptions
Comitium source code (developed by nytpu)
Comitium is basically the perfect solution for me. It supports RSS/Atom/JSON feeds over both HTTP(s) and gemini (and gopher, for that matter), as well as the gemlog format which is fairly popular on gemini. It's also an exceedingly simple design; it just dumps static files into a folder, and leaves it to you to host them. There's no extra service that needs to be running, and just a single environment variable that needs to be configured in conjunction with a cronjob.
This weekend I decided to spend some time migrating all my subscribed feeds to a comitium installation, which of course remains public. I've named the result:
Now all my HTTP and gemini subscriptions are interleaved together in one place. Amazing!
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Published 2024-06-04
This site is a mirror of my gemini capsule. The equivalent gemini page can be found here, and you can learn more about gemini at my 🚀 What is Gemini? page.
Hi! My name is Brian and I'm available for short-term remote contract work. Whether you need a consultant to guide you through a difficult problem or another pair of hands to smash out some code, I can do it all. Learn more about me and my skillset by browsing around this site, head over to my resume to find my actual work history, and shoot me an email when you're ready to get in touch.