[HN Gopher] CLI RSS/Atom feed reader inspired by Taskwarrior, sy...
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CLI RSS/Atom feed reader inspired by Taskwarrior, synced using Git
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 59 points
Date : 2026-03-08 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| susam wrote:
| Glad to see an RSS/Atom feed reader project on HN. The demo looks
| nice. The 'Design Philosophy' section [1] is rather nice too. The
| more such projects we have, the merrier. In my view, adding an
| RSS/Atom feed is one of the best things one can do for a personal
| website, provided one wants to be part of the loose social
| network and ecosystem that exists around RSS/Atom feeds.
|
| Some detractors might say that RSS is dead today, but the reality
| is far from it. In fact, most of the traffic to my personal
| website comes from RSS feeds. A little game on my website even
| became moderately popular after someone discovered it via my RSS
| feed and shared it here on HN [2].
|
| In fact the three largest sources of traffic to my website are,
| in decreasing order, RSS feeds, newsletters and search engines.
| Reviewing the referer (sic) data in my web server logs from time
| to time, I was surprised to discover just how many community
| maintained tech newsletters exist on the Web and how active their
| user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my
| silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits
| from its followers. But I digress. Back to RSS/Atom feeds now.
|
| So I was saying that there is indeed a decent user base around
| RSS feeds. I can see from the 'referer' logs that every time I
| publish a new note or article on my website, a good number of
| visitors arrive by clicking a feed entry that shows up in their
| feed reader. I know this with some confidence by looking at the
| 'referer' headers of visits to my HTML pages and the subsequent
| browsing of the website, as opposed to the isolated and automated
| fetches of the XML feeds. So there must be a reasonably active
| base of users around RSS feeds. It is a bit like being part of an
| invisible social network that we know exists and that we can
| measure through indirect evidence.
|
| Many personal websites publish a blogroll with a list of their
| favourite bloggers. One thing I wish more blogrolls had is links
| to the bloggers' feeds or, even better, an OPML file that I could
| import into my feed reader. Then I could keep multiple
| collections of blogs in my feed reader, for example _Alice 's
| Blogroll_, _Bob 's Blogroll_ and so on. I do publish an OPML file
| for my blogroll [3], and I urge other personal websites with
| blogrolls to do the same.
|
| [1] https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy
|
| [2] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html
|
| [3] https://susam.net/roll.html
| treetalker wrote:
| This would really hit the spot with saved (and ad hoc) content
| searches! Any plans to add that?
| kantord wrote:
| I was considering adding a full offline mode but here is my
| thinking: that is actually a feature/concern that would be
| separately useful, so it should not be baked into blogtato. And
| there might be already some pretty good options out there.
|
| For instance, `wget` is a pretty widely used HTTP client that
| is able to mirror links for offline access. Then you can use
| standard tools such as `grep` to search in all the offline
| content. And `blogtato` does already have an export feature, so
| it is almost trivial to write a script that saves all posts for
| online content.
|
| So perhaps what should be done here is find a user friendly
| tool for offline access/search for web content and just add
| some convenience features to `blogtato` so that they integrate
| very easily.
| kantord wrote:
| Hi todsacerdoti thanks for posting my project! I am the author if
| blogtato. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| How did "taskwarrior" become so influential? It doesn't seem to
| provide anything other GTD code doesn't provide, but it only
| offers an inaccessible interface. What's the draw here?
| kantord wrote:
| i do not find the interface of taskwarrior inaccessible at all,
| i actually really love using it and find it largely intuitive.
| Not necessarily for doing super complex stuff, but that is not
| something I ever wanted anyways
| senkora wrote:
| I think taskwarrior vs OmniFocus/Todoist/Things 3 is a similar
| vibe to vim vs IDE.
|
| Some people want a minimalist tool that they can read a manual
| for and then configure / install extensions for to their
| liking, and some people want a discoverable batteries-included
| GUI.
|
| taskwarrior is simply the program and format that has the most
| support and biggest extension ecosystem for that first group of
| people.
|
| Both are fine.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Minor nitpick but this is TUI and not CLI. CLI means you can pipe
| the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any
| other program.
| petcat wrote:
| It looks like it's both
| kantord wrote:
| there might be some gaps (let me know) but you can actually
| pipe the output to another program.
|
| for instance here's how you'd download all the unread blog
| posts by combining blogtato and wget:
|
| blog .unread read | wget \ --recursive --level=1 \ --page-
| requisites \ --convert-links \ --adjust-extension \ --no-parent
| \ --directory-prefix="$HOME/offline-posts" \ --input-file=-
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Oh sweet. I always appreciate having the ability to script
| this kind of thing.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| You started out strong but fumbled in your second sentence.
|
| > CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things
| like sed and grep and any other program.
|
| No, that's not a prereq for a CLI. "CLI" means "command-line
| interface", that's it. Vim's command line is still a command
| line even though it's totally disjoint from the UNIX shell and
| the entire process model. Even primarily graphical apps can
| expose a command line in the UI. Think of the VSCode command
| palette, for example, copied from SublimeText.
|
| (Though all the examples cited here are editors, there's no
| reason for it to be restricted to that. Indeed, even _more_
| graphical apps _should_ sport command lines inside them.)
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Heh fair enough. I conflated the UNIX shell and command line
| as a general concept.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I maintain list of feeds, if anyone is interested
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
|
| https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
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