Generic RSS feed reader?

Feature Requests
1

I would love to see a generic RSS reader app that lets you plug in any site feed to pull headlines.

If this is too broad is there a quick way to make a site specific app (e.g. using any RSS URL)?
examples:
https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
https://www.polygon.com/rss/index.xml
https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?searchin=first&forumchoice[]=9&rss=1
http://www.dpreview.com/feeds/news/latest
https://movieweb.com/feed/

2

so - my 10 cents… I’ve built a number of the news apps using RSS feeds. A number of the apps I WANTED to build - easily exceed the timeout for apps on the Tidbyt servers - so it’s a tricky thing. I’ve bypassed the issue with a combination of Github & CI/CD scripts to pre-pull the data and then have the app get it from gihub (see my Mayo Clinic News app - it doesn’t pull from their feed directly). If you allow just any URL - you might get a blank screen and you’ve got no insight into why without doing debugging yourself & pulling the code. I’m certainly happy to look at some of these URLs. I can take my normal News app, modify it for a list of URLs (the above is a starting point) and then take requests to add more & review as necessary / reject those that don’t / can’t make the cut. What should we call the app? “Misc RSS Feeds?”

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3

Thanks for chiming in. I definitely don’t have the same insights as you. I understand some of what you’re saying and also noticed that not all feeds are the same (e.g. polygon/verge is pretty clean while slickdeals has plenty of “![CDATA[”. meanwhile dpreview being full of encoded text!).

I’m not sure I understand fully, but are you suggesting a single app that has a drop down of vetted feeds rather than letting people paste the feed URL?

Also, for the record I only have experience using the tidbyt prior to gifting it to someone. I did back a gen 2 model though. I just submitted this feature hoping to solve other requests that can be addressed by using RSS site feeds as a source of fresh content for the tidbyt to cycle through.

4

yes. So look at my Mens or Womens Soccer as an example. You get a drop down of leagues. In that app I have a file in the “cloud” that lists the leagues you can monitor. I would do this the same way & give a drop down of options (that also allows us to update the list outside of needing a Tidbyt community app merge & makes new feeds faster to adopt). For this I’d only want to do the headlines (instead of headlines + text like I do in “The Guardian” or “Financial Times” - it would be more like Wall Street Journal/CNN/CBC.ca/FoxNews). Don’t worry about the CDATA stuff - that’s all fixable - I’ve got stuff that parses it and handles a bunch of it. I need to fix my AA app to handle some things better as well.

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5

I’ve got a ping in my calendar to look at it this weekend. the good news is 90% of the code is already written. It’s just a matter of the feeds & testing performance. Then deciding what to call it and getting Mats to merge it for us.

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6

That’s great! I basically never use a computer without a feedly tab open. It’s one of my most used mobile apps too.

I appreciate your efforts.

7

@markazali here’s 4 of the feeds… Thoughts? the Digital Photography RSS is a hot mess - so I didn’t enable it. I’m going to curate the feeds and enabled description display only for feeds that it makes sense for (like Moveiweb, but not the other 3).
0 rss_misc_feeds
1 rss_misc_feeds
2 rss_misc_feeds
3 rss_misc_feeds

this is what the drop down of options looks like.
image

and it’ll allow you to select from 1 - 3 articles (because of limits of Marquee heights).

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8

It’s great! Thank you. I guess if I think of more I’ll just reply here ?? I guess when it’s live and people know who published they can also request

9

re: Additions - reply Here (this topic will eventually auto-close itself) & mention my ID - or over on the tidbyt discord channel. I typically check in once or twice a week both places (in between meetings). Worst case - do an issue on Tidbyt github & mention my github ID @jvivona - I’ll get an email about that.

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10

If these aren’t much trouble, could you add
https://la.eater.com/rss/front-page/index.xml
https://9to5google.com/feed/
https://9to5mac.com/feed/

11

give it 15 minutes. make sure to close your app on your mobile device & relaunch it.

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12

I was able to play with it over the weekend. It’s great.
If any suggestions, I’d say allow more than 3 posts to be pulled? Maybe 10?

Thank you so much for making this.

13

well - you are going to run out of height on the marquee. A vertical marquee is restricted to 320px high, which for titles only, allows for 40ish lines of text… each headline is somewhere between 6 and 10 lines high - so that’s why I picked 3. I’m happy to mod & change it to 10 - but you are going to get a TON of text cut off and only get a few articles and I don’t want you wondering why… lots of extra processing cycles in the loop for really no gain in function. it’ll look like this on the screen.
image

14

Oops. Fine as is then. I wasn’t aware of the vertical limitation. Thanks!

15

I’m going to push an update to allow up to 5 - you can decide on each feed if it’s worth it or not (e.g. you are consistently getting more than 3) - I’m sure there are some instances where the titles are short and it may be worthwhile. But some (I’m gonna pick on slickdeals for a sec) - I think their folks get paid by the posted word for titles…

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16

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