In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.

ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.

Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.

Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.

I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.

this on an e-reader would be lovely. perhaps limiting the adding / removal of the source list to once a week or month would add another layer of purposefulness to it. want!

Kagi News does something similar, for what it's worth.

https://newsboat.org/

nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.

There's active work towards that (which could run as part of CI) and it looks very promising: https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

that's a valid concern.

first of all, i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. for xml parsing, i'm using libexpat, one of the most widely used c xml parsers.

for networking, i'm using libcurl, the industry standard.

i have some limits in place, too. the feed size is capped at 200 kb, and there are timeouts for hanging connections. there's also a sanitization step that strips control characters that could mess with the terminal emulator, mitigating escape sequences.

that said, i'm no security expert, and the source code is public. if anyone more knowledgeable spots a security hole, i'd be happy to merge a fix.

Zig actually does bring some new and innovative ideas to programming. While Zig itself may not become the next big thing a lot of ideas in it most certainly will find their way into languages moving forward.

it works like fashion in clothing.

Ideally, one should pipe into $PAGER, or, if that's missing, into "pager" (it's usually symlinked to less), or, if that's missing, into "less"/"more"/"cat", or, if even those are missing, then just write to stdout.

sometimes the simplest solution is the best! i love the unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

Write programs to work together.

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!