rssCloud

I've been using FreshRSS for a while as a backend for NetNewsWire and decided to finally create an extension to add rssCloud support.

This not only does what you'd expect: subscribe to feeds that support rssCloud <cloud> elements. But it also supports subscribing via HTTPS when port 443 or the protocol "https-post" are specified. It even looks for the latest and greatest <source:cloud> element from Dave Winer's source namespace.

But wait, there's more!

Since FreshRSS supports subscribing to an OPML file, I'll even look for a <source:cloud> element on OPML files and subscribe for real-time updates. This is super handy if you want to subscribe to the OPML feed for the super cool I ♥ RSS directory!

Last night, I finally released the 4.0 rewrite of the rssCloud Server.

I'm very paranoid about breakage, so technically there was a version 3.0 that came out in May, but it was a necessary step to shore up the old codebase before the big rewrite.

The big changes have been reorganizing the repo into a pnpm monorepo and extracting packages for reuse in other projects. The packages are being rewritten in TypeScript and export both ESM and CJS modules. So far, I haven't published the packages to npm, but that will be coming soon.

I was inspired by the rssCloud plugin for WordPress in that it exposed the subscriber side of the protocol, but doesn't expose a ping endpoint because that half is handled internally. My hope is to allow any Node apps that produce RSS to easily add support without relying on an external server. That's ultimately the best case for the future of the protocol and the decentralized web. I don't want my server to become a silo.

Expect to hear more this week as I write about some new features and ecosystem improvements.