I made A RSS for myself.

Before RSS I used to read Live Journal, before that it was CIX and before that it was FidoNet with maybe a little bit of Usenet thrown in around the edges. I have been reading the Internets for a very long time.

It has now been ten years since google announced they where shutting down google reader signalling the end of RSS as a thing you could rely on and I never really found a replacement apart from being annoyed at twitter.

I mean obviously RSS didn't just stop working overnight but it no longer felt like it stood a chance of getting better. From here on in it was only going to get worse, no one big was pushing it and it would suffer a slow painful death.

Which is exactly what happened, it is pretty easy to find big sites now that do not provide any RSS feeds of their content and I forget when I last saw a site proudly displaying an RSS icon.

Now google reader wasn't the best but it was less terrible than anything else. Many readers are more book mark managers or email clients that have had some RSS tacked on. I'm not interested in any of these things, I want that endless doom scroll that I have been used to for decades.

So, I figure I'm gonna have to build it myself.

I present for you, my A RSS reader and invite you to join me. Go back into the water, live there, die there.

https://github.com/xriss/arss

ARSS Provides a column of endless scrolling and a quick site preview in an iframe right next to it, you never have to click anything just doomscroll and doomread like baby jebus intended.

You got problems, open up an issue on github, you don't got problems then jump right in at https://xriss.github.io/arss/ and import an OPML

Also because we are just a web page we can hot link direct to RSS feeds for a quick view like https://xriss.github.io/arss/?idb=delete&opml=https://itch.io/devlogs.xml#READ or like https://xriss.github.io/arss/?idb=delete&opml=http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml#READ

This is a client side application, running dynamical in a web page with no real server backend.

Except, well security theatre is a bitch and we are currently using a CORS bouncer to get around web browser issues.

Note that these are not technical issues, everything we are doing is pretty simple, these are self induced security restrictions implemented by browsers to stop "bad guys" from doing "bad things" unfortunately "bad guy" just means "not google" or "not facebook" who get to do all the evil they want.

Think cookie popups, well meaning but ultimately bullshit and with no way to opt out of the "solution".

I think we can hack around this some more to remove the CORS bouncer and use a browser extension instead but this will obviously be even less user friendly than the current solution.

Until then I am happy with the current state, it uses client side databases for caching and even lets you keep your feeds in a gist as a simple persistent login system. Yeah its a bit technical to do that but if you want to read A RSS Feed then you are already in the top tech 1%ers :)