Launching the powRSS Feed Aggregator

Today I’m releasing a public feed aggregator! Once I’ve collected enough feeds and finished integration with the other powRSS features, it will be available directly on powRSS.

For now, you can check out the beta at https://aggregator.enocc.com.

Note that RSS Feed suggestions are welcome! Just send me an e-mail and as long as your site doesn’t have tons of tracking or ads I’ll be happy to add it to the feed.

Background

Yesterday’s post about discovering small independent websites made me think back to the early days of the Gemini protocol. To find new sites to read, most people relied on a public feed aggregator called CAPCOM. The premise was simple: take a list of Atom feeds and generate a feed of recently updated posts from each site.

CAPCOM was based on a similar feed aggregator used in Gopherspace called Bongusta, but the goal was the same: having a central place to find new sites based on recent updates from people in the community.

After writing that blog post I updated my links page with more resources to find independent sites, mainly directories and search engines, and that got me thinking about having a similar feed aggregator for the web.

A few months ago I released an app called powRSS to find and read RSS feeds, but it served a different purpose. Rather than providing a list, it was more of a tool to check if a website had an active RSS feed, and if it did, recent blog posts were readable right from the site. With this aggregator, powRSS will be having a new feature soon.

How it works

The goal is to integrate the aggregator feature into powRSS. I’m not doing that yet because I’m taking a different approach to generating the feed, inspired by CAPCOM. Whereas powRSS Search renders blogs server-side dynamically based on user input, the feed aggregator will be generated statically once a day. After the feed is generated, every visit is redirected to a static HTML file with all the links from the feeds list. This makes it snappy!

Some of the feeds I added have posts going back decades. Since the main goal is to make smaller indie sites discoverable, I chose to limit the feed to posts published in the past month. As the list of sites grows, different sites will be selected each month, keeping things fresh and giving everyone a chance to get featured.

Just like CAPCOM and Bongusta, the powRSS Aggregator will be open-sourced so you can self-host it on your own blogs :-)

I can’t wait to see the feeds you curate with it!