How I Get My News
Intro⌗
How do you consume your news? Podcasts? TV? Radio? Online publications?
All of these are fine and dandy for most people who might consume less than a dozen sources of news – but what about someone who follows hundreds of blogs/news organizations? If I spent everyday visiting blogs (that may not even be updated yet) and other various news sites to read their news and stay informed, I would literally have no time left in my day. Thus enters RSS.
What is RSS?⌗
RSS is a protocol that allows for the transmission and aggregation of web content. Doesn’t really sound ground-breaking, so what does that mean for us? Let’s say XYZ News has an RSS feed, you just copy the link of the RSS feed and you simply import it to your RSS reader. XYZ News publishes a new post and it automatically gets transmitted over RSS into a neat text document in my RSS reader. Instead of checking hundreds of sources for news, I simply open up my RSS reader and all of my news is there.
Which RSS reader to choose?⌗
Now the question of choosing an RSS reader was actually tough and rather annoying for such a simple protocol. Most RSS readers seemed insanely bloated and outdated (looking at you Thunderbird). I also wanted something open-source for Windows (so no Newsflow). So after a lot of messing around with various readers on my Windows host and giving up on running a reader on Windows altogether, I decided this is a perfect task for my Pi server which also serves DNS.
Miniflux⌗
For this task I chose Miniflux, which would run as a service on my Pi and be accessible over my LAN. Side note here, I also use a PIA VPN so make sure you enable split-tunneling to reach your RSS server over LAN. You have to configure a new user for miniflux on the server which is simple enough. I had to add a line to the /etc/miniflux.conf file to bind the service to a different port and then restart the service. After that, I can now browse to my Pi’s local IP while connected to my VPN and have all my news in one source!