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by rcarmo·10y ago·view on hn ↗
I have a fair amount of code that people can re-use to build their own aggregators, since I did a number of experiments when Google Reader died.

One was a Fever clone that had a number of strategies for doing parallel fetching:

- https://github.com/rcarmo/bottle-fever

Andrea Peltrin took that and evolved it into Coldsweat: https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat - which I recommend if you want a web UI.

I did a number of other things, but eventually went back to what I used _before_ Google Reader: e-mail.

I was one of the contributors for http://newspipe.sourceforge.net/, and after getting bottle-fever going I decided to investigate the state of the art and did a quick fork of rss2email that injected messages into an IMAP store instead of sending them via SMTP, to avoid spam traps.

It was a quick hack, but it allowed me to read feeds using any mobile IMAP client, and a friend eventually did a Go version, which I've also tweaked to my liking:

- https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap (Python) - https://github.com/rcarmo/go-rss2imap (Go)

Any of the above are likely to save people a fair amount of time (do bear in mind that the Python version was a hack atop code that was written by Aaron Swartz a decade ago, and it shows its age).

These days I ended up going back to Feedly, simply because I have to use Windows, the Web UI is good enough and there are lots of good clients for the platforms I use (NextGen, Reeder, etc.)

Plus I realised that trying to archive stuff from hundreds of feeds was somewhat pointless -- the stuff I really want to keep around goes into Pocket or OneNote, and that's that.

Edit: Also, here are some notes from 2008 on Bayesian classification and its effectiveness: http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2008/01/27/2203#an-update-on-...

1 comments
I like the idea of (ab)using protocols to do not-quite what they were intended to do.

Pushing RSS feeds into IMAP is a great idea - I wonder how much work it'd take to make NewsBeuter to that, then expose it somewhere and have FastMail pull it into a folder for me.

These hacks eventually start looking like Rube-Goldberg machines, but they've got a certain charm.

Offtopic: I wrote a Wake-on-Lan server that allows me to turn on VMs as if they were physical machines - https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/tree/master/CSharp/Virt...

The next one for me is probably going to be a DNS server that resolves the name and IPs of VMs.