Reading RSS

If you intend to read RSS on one device, setup is easy - just add your feeds to your reader of choice for whatever platform you're on - done.

It used to be just as easy to sync across devices for free using a Google service, but that's been shut down for years, and while there are replacement services like feedbin, feedly, and the old reader - these options have two problems: they are not free (understandably) and they rely on other people's servers.

In order to make RSS reading a practical option for me, I want the following:

• A dedicated app on my iphone
• A dedicated app on my primary daily computer, a Mac
• A way to sync what I've read from my feeds
• Sync service needs to be self-installed on a computer in my house
• Sync needs to work outside of my network

My long-term intention was to setup a home-lab server, which I may still do but in the meanwhile I remembered that my archive drive system - a Synology drive, can act as a home lab server of sorts. The Synology drive has a whole app install system, but the app choices do not include an RSS server. The Synology drive does include one mega-app called Container Manager, which provides handy UI for setting up docker containers.

I followed a simple walkthrough video for installing a self-hosted RSS sync service called FreshRSS. By the way, if the video link goes away, you can search "Install FreshRSS on a Synology NAS using Container Manager / Docker Compose" in another invidious instance or on YouTube. This video was handy because it's showing how to do the setup on version 7+ of the Synology OS; older versions were capable of docker too, but didn't have the Container Manager app.

Doing this rather easy install process got me a hosted service to sync my RSS feeds with. I can read the feed of a website on my phone and later when I check my feeds on my computer, the posts I read will have a "read" status. That is so valuable to make RSS reading practical.

The last piece of the puzzle was to enable external access. In my case, I was able to open up port forwarding on my router for the port I picked when setting up FreshRSS. I also have a static IP block, so all I needed to to was update my Fresh RSS API url in my reader apps to the external IP and port.

Lastly I needed an RSS reader app. Since I'm using Apple devices primarily (for now), I'm using NetNewsWire. There are many other app options, but NetNewsWire has a nice combination of well working native app UI, it's free, and it supports feed sync from FreshRSS servers.

So far, I'm very happy with this setup. I can centralize my list of sites to keep track of. I can manage them with FreshRSS's simple web UI. Lastly, I can enjoy reading and staying updated with the small web - any number of sites and blogs that have an RSS feed.