I decided to properly try Claude’s ability to “vibe code” and got it to create me an RSS reader of my very own. I tend to read a lot of regular websites this way; it makes it much easier to keep tabs on what I’m reading – all through a single interface. I’ve been paying $5/month to Feedbin for a long while, and thought that if I had my own, customised RSS reader, I might save a bit of money1
Therefore, I’d like to introduce DuckFeed RSS (formally known as ArseBucket – it’s undergoing a rebrand for obvious reasons, so the screenshot below may be out of date). It lets me import OPML feed files, and read them by category. It does exports too. In the settings menu, there is the ability to add categories and move the feeds between them. There is a right-click menu option for marking categories or individual feeds as read (as well as other options), and eventually I want to be able to move feeds between categories this way too without having to keep going to the menu.
The system refreshes the feeds every 15 minutes (through cron), and the user can manually refresh from the user interface. The UI itself can be customised – fonts, spacing, etc. and there were a few revisions improving the readability of articles (The Register’s feed essentially became one massive paragraph for a lot of their stuff). Read articles can be hidden or greyed out. Feeds can individually be set to retrieve extracts or full text (though there is a bit of a bug with backfill which is being looked at).
Additionally, the whole system ships as a zip file and an installer/upgrade shell script which handles everything from database and admin set-up through to SELinux context settings. The upgrade script ensures all new PHP files, etc. and updated database schemas are applied. It verifies everything as part of the process.
Future features including user invites (and possibly user registration), a name change (to something probably more sensible, though I cannot guarantee this – please put ideas in the comments below), sharing articles, more customisable user interface options, and so on.
In short: this is a fully fledged web-based RSS reader which replaces Feedbin and my trial of NewsBlur which wants $39/year for basic reading and doesn’t even let me add RSS feeds like this blog (no, for that requires a $99/year subscription).
Footnotes
- Not really, I pay for Claude Pro at £15/month – but that brings with it a wealth of other benefits. ↩︎