Digest

A couple months back I moved off Feedly (for reading RSS feeds) and switched to my own handcrafted reader, Digest.

It started when I came across Karin Hendrikse’s article on building a static RSS reader (oh how I love static files), and then Terry Godier’s post on RSS and phantom obligations nudged me away from the idea that a feed reader has to be something like Feedly or Google Reader. At some point Feedly started adding more AI features (ugh) and I decided it was time to part ways and do my own thing.

Digest is a little command-line tool I built in Go that reads a list of feed URLs from a text file, fetches all of them in parallel, caches the responses, parses the feeds, and then compiles a list of all the posts from the day before into a static HTML file. That’s basically it. I run it manually on my laptop and rsync the HTML up to my server so I can get to it on my phone.

It’s been great so far. A few other thoughts and observations:

• Boundaries and edges feel good. It’s like a personal daily newspaper, where it’s very clear when I’ve finished for the day. Infinite rivers carry more stress, I think. Or maybe I just like checking things off lists.
• The slight time distancing also feels good — quiet and calm. Because it’s a daily digest from the day before, it feels like less of a dopamine slot machine. No more checking Feedly dozens of times a day.
• I originally had Digest run on my server via a cron job, but I moved back to running it manually on my laptop and I’ve found that I much prefer it this way. Fewer moving parts. (If I’m unable to generate the digest on any given day, by the way, I can pass the date as a command-line argument to the tool and it’ll compile posts for that date instead of yesterday’s.) A bit more resilient, too — I can just open the HTML file locally on my laptop if I want, no server needed.
• At first I included the contents of each post in the file, but I’ve since trimmed it down so each entry just has the post title and link plus the blog title and the author, and I open each link in a new tab. After decades of reading RSS feeds in homogenized typographic settings (all posts in the same font, etc.), I thought I wouldn’t care to read posts on their original sites, but I was wrong. I love it. Especially since most of what I read is on the small web.

As of now I have no plans to release Digest as open source, but maybe this description will inspire someone to build their own tool that meets their personal needs.