November 21, 2024
Shared feeds from Reeder are a neat idea, embeds would make them better
Reeder is a much loved RSS feed reader for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Or at least it was until its latest update.
The new concept was a bit too weird for me — and apparently for a lot of other people as well — so I put off testing it and stuck with what is now known as Reeder Classic. Good old Reeder was good enough for me.
But curiosity about a feature called shared feeds finally got the best of me. So I downloaded the app to my iPad and paid for an annual subscription, which worked out to a little over a dollar a month.
Setting up a shared feed was fairly easy. I created a tag called “latest” and tagged a few items with it. I then went to the “latest” folder, long pressed and had a look at its settings. In the sharing section you can turn on a public JSON feed and give it a name. You get a public URL, which you can share.
Here’s the feed I made. It’s hosted by Reeder’s developer at reederapp.net.
Now, every time I tag an item with “latest,” it shows up in this public feed. I’m not sure what to do with this, but it definitely has a coolness factor.
It would be even cooler, though, if you could embed it on a website. There's no way to do this from within the app, but you can grab a JSON feed with a little JavaScript — if the server allows it. This one — as a security precaution — does not. The workaround is to create a proxy with PHP.
It took a lot of fussing with the help of ChatGPT, but here’s what I managed. I like how it turned out. An embed like this could possibly be used to give readers updates from other websites. I hope the developer eventually allows you to create embeds from the app.
Will I actually use it? I’m still thinking about it.