alt.hn

4/28/2026 at 7:12:46 PM

Sourcefeed – a pop-up RSS service

https://www.sourcefeed.app/

by bjhess

5/2/2026 at 3:26:47 PM

This reminds me of one of my favorite Mac apps ever, Feeder:

Literally, the only app I miss after leaving the Apple ecosystem.

The question I always have is how to keep a permanent archive of entries for long-running publication histories. You don't want the feed to grow without bounds, so paging (by time period or sliding windows of X entries) seems useful. Atom feeds have RFC 5005 links. I don't recall such for RSS 2.0, but it wouldn't be that hard to extend, I guess.

by michaelsmanley

5/2/2026 at 4:15:26 AM

clever. i personally don't see the appeal of limiting my blog to rss readers only - i like having a web link that can be shared. this would almost be better as a sort of covert blog, like maybe a smallnet adjacent thing -- no potential to be shared on hackernews is a pro for many ppl.

by j3s

5/3/2026 at 11:45:16 AM

I love RSS as a way to subscribe to news feeds. But I want my RSS to do just that: when I click on the link, I want it to open the original website.

I have tried the "reader" part of many RSS apps, and to me it always sucks. If the original website is unreadable, I just don't subscribe to it. It if is nicely done, then the RSS reader usually makes it worse.

by palata

5/2/2026 at 4:35:04 AM

I once implemented my blog as pure RSS, but also a website that could render arbitrary RSS feeds as a normal looking blog. (Passing the RSS feed via query parameter).

The nice part was that the bit that was mine was just a single static file.

The awkward part was the URLs looked crappy.

by fudgeonastick

5/2/2026 at 7:51:22 AM

It used to be possible to make bare RSS very readable with XSLT.

by xnx

5/3/2026 at 11:45:12 AM

At one point I had both my own feed styled via XSLT to match my main site and a feed aggregator written in XSLT that parsed an OPML file, combined feeds, sorted by date, truncated post content for the list view, etc.

Browsers never should have thrown the spec in the dumpster. They should have kept up to date and shipped XSLT 3

by _heimdall

5/2/2026 at 3:20:41 AM

Barry! Funny seeing you here. Slick design on this

by evanwalsh

5/2/2026 at 1:56:38 PM

Evan! Hope you’re well.

(To be clear, I didn’t create Sourcefeed.)

by bjhess

5/3/2026 at 10:40:37 AM

Too few people use RSS to limit your audience to this.

Have a website.

by ymolodtsov