Github as an RSS manager

p3l6.dev|☰

Syncing feed lists stored in a github repository.

I converted what was my RSS subscription list backup to be the source of truth instead.

On my Mac, I use Reeder for keeping up with RSS feeds. Until now, I had been using the local subscription mode, with no cloud syncing or anything fancy. Instead, I would routinely use the “export to OPML” feature to store a backup of my subscriptions in my github dotfiles repo.

Now, I have started using inoreader as a cloud service, which integrates nicely with Reeder for reading on the desktop.

OPML files

The backups were stored in an OPML format. After looking at what was being exported, and searching online to find very old spec documents, I manually edited the file to be more easily maintainable. I reduce a couple fields I did not thing were necessary, and standardize the order of fields in the file. For example, entries in the xml document might look like this

<outline type="rss"
  text="Apple Newsroom"
  xmlUrl="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/rss-feed.rss"
  htmlUrl="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/"
/>

The fields here are

  • text the feed title
  • xmlUrl the feed location
  • htmlUrl which refers to the homepage of the blog that a browser might view.

There is also a header and footer in the file, which I compressed onto a couple lines to keep it out of the way.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<opml version="2.0"><head><title>RSS</title></head><body>
 ... feed subscriptions ...
</body></opml>

inoreader

I looked at a few cloud RSS aggregators, but chose inoreader for two main reasons:

  1. It integrated with Reeder
  2. It has a feature called OPML subscriptions

The idea behind these OPML subscriptions is that Bob would publish a list of feeds online that he reads. Alice, then, would subscribe to Bob’s feeds, and be kept up to date whenever Bob adds something new. In this case, I am acting as both parties, by subscribing to my own OPML files.

For this to work, I split out my single long subscription list into a handful of smaller ones. Each one represents a folder that I was previously using, along with a catch-all called “Assorted”. You can see the current list of folders in the repository. While the OPML format does allow folders of feeds to be specified, the OPML subscriptions feature squashes all the feeds from a single subscription into a single folder.

This process must then be completed for each folder:

  1. In inoreader settings, navigate to import/export/backup
  2. Find the button to add a new OPML subscription and click it
  3. Use the url for the raw GitHub content: 
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<user>/<repo>/master/<path>/<file>.opml
  4. Enter a new folder name, matching the OPML file name
  5. Use full synchronization (to unsubscribe when a feed is removed from the source)
  6. Uncheck notify when updated (since I’m subscribing to my own feeds, I already know when they update)

Adding a new feed

The positive upshot of all this is that I can now subscribe to new feeds (or remove stale ones) by changing a small amount of plain text in my dotfiles repository, and have it propagate to my client. In the process, I have made sure that my list of subscriptions will always be up to date; and as a bonus of the cloud, my unread indicators will sync across multiple devices. That’s great, as one of the main goals of having a dotfiles repository is environment syncing!

Final thoughts

While (un)subscribing to feeds is something I do very infrequently, it was still very pleasing to me to have this work out in such an elegant way.

I have also noticed that the Reeder client does a better job rendering a few feeds when they go through inoreader, as opposed to standard RSS. I can’t really explain that, but it has been nice too!