Really Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is a technology that has been around for quite some time now. It is widely used to keep track of updates from websites and blogs without having to visit them one by one. With an RSS reader, you can get a listing of the entire website and choose the article you want to read. Even better, you can subscribe to YouTube channels and other social feeds through RSS as well.
However, using RSS readers online can come with some drawbacks. Ads, brief summaries, and redirects are just a few of the issues you may encounter. One of the other problems with RSS readers online is that they can be expensive. Popular services like Feedly, Inoreader, and Newsblur charge between $3 to $10 per month for their services. This wasn’t always the case though, as Google Reader used to provide a free service until it was discontinued.
Thankfully, there is a solution – using a feed aggregator. A feed aggregator is a tool that allows you to read your RSS feeds without leaving your RSS reader. It removes ads and redirects and displays the full article instead of just a brief summary. We can then use this together with an RSS feed reader. I am a fan of FOSS and that is what we are going to set up in this video.
Setting up an RSS feed aggregator
I use docker self-hosted aggregator fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker or if you want to pay money you can use five filters aggregator.
Here is the docker command to install and configure it on my docker server using port 50000
docker run -d \
--name=full-test-rss \
-p 50000:80 \
--restart always \
heussd/fivefilters-full-text-rss:latest
Setting Up the RSS Feed Reader
There are a couple of different ways to pull in these RSS feeds. For browsers, there is Vivaldi and external programs like Obsidian, and for self-hosted I recommend FreshRSS
I use my docker server again to host this on port 8080
docker run -d \
--name=freshrss \
-e PUID=1000 \
-e PGID=1000 \
-e TZ=Europe/London \
-p 49999:80 \
-v /path/to/data:/config \
--restart unless-stopped \
lscr.io/linuxserver/freshrss:latest
