A couple of weeks later, my web-based RSS reader developed through (and by) Claude is coming along quite nicely. It’s a genuinely useful tool now and has completely replaced my previous RSS readers. It’s great for research and catching up on tech news, which has always been a big thing for me – when you’re working in IT, you’ve always got to be aware of what’s going on!
I’ve added many new features, including coloured headers based on the favicon of the site whose data we’re pulling. Categories are collapsible, settings and admin functions have been separated, there are more options for right-click menus, two-factor authentication has been fully implemented, and we have the ability to highlight paragraphs and add notes to articles which can be shared with other users (that you know – you can’t just randomly spam people) of the system or through email, Threads or LinkedIn. The notes section still needs a fair bit of work – it’s not as user-friendly as I want it to be as yet, but the fundamentals are there.
We have versioning for articles that are updated (at one point I saw something from the BBC that had been updated seven times), though I want to change the logic behind how articles are pulled and processed. I’m going to be removing the manual refresh because, as I’ve found out, this can cause significant problems for some sites, which can result in temporary blocking. So we’re getting a major update to the polling and processing engine soon (I’ve run out of my weekly usage limits at the time of writing).
As soon as I have an idea or need something to be fixed, I jot it down in Apple Notes and tick it off (previously it was all bullet points and strikethroughs). Each one essentially represents a separate chat in Claude. I have learnt quickly that keeping one massive chat is not productive, and that by re-uploading the last release back with a PROJECT_MANIFEST.md file which outlines how to build (especially with a flattened structure), new chats will quickly pick up what’s been done and continue. I must get around to using GitHub for a significantly more efficient workflow.
Here’s a gallery of different DuckFeed RSS screens – user and admin. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible while packing in as many useful features as possible, with minimal maintenance required.
