Jack Baty

Director of Unspecified Services

Combining my RSS feeds using RSS-Bridge

There's this dream I have in which I've combined all of my websites into a single place where I post everything. It's glorious. Then, I wake up and remember the mess of sites I've scattered far and wide.

I'm learning the painful lesson that I have so much fun trying new tools and platforms that I'll never be content putting everything into just one of them. So, I continue tinkering with my blog and my wiki and my other blog and my other other blog.

Each of them has their own RSS feed.

There are a few people who, oddly, follow several or all of them. For those who might be interested in keeping track of everything I post, I've been looking for a way to generate an aggregate RSS feed.

At one point I used WordPress and some plugins for this, but I'd rather not have to run WordPress and the plugins were expensive if I wanted specific behaviors.

There are a services for this like rss.app, RSS Hub, etc. but they're all either expensive or not what I'm looking for.

I initially skipped RSS-Bridge because I assumed it wasn't what I needed. I received a nudge about it from Christian Tietze and he was right, along with a bunch of other things, it can fairly easily combine several feeds.

The short version is that I dropped a bunch of PHP files (RSS-Bridge) onto my server and did some copy/paste/edit hacking to create a new "bridge" and now I have a combined feed. (here's the new bridge)

Since the URL for the combined feed is clunky, I'm redirecting from this URL: https://baty.net/everything.rss. That way I can move things around without breaking the link. I hope.

I'm not getting too attached to this yet, since I've only been running my instance of RSS-Bridge for a few hours and who knows what kind of unintended consequences there will be. But it will be cool if it works out.