feeder: atom and rss feeds via email 📫

I enjoy reading blogs and subscribe to news aggregators for periodic updates. I have been using news readers for some time, but I also often try to reduce the amount of channels I check for updates periodically. To merge news feed and email updates, I've been using blogtrottr in the past, to read feed updates in my email inbox. blogtrottr works great and reliably, but I enjoy writing apps that scratch my itches as well 😁

In this case the result is feeder, a small app written in Go. It downloads a configured set of news feeds (RSS or Atom), figures out what posts it hasn't seen and then sends them to my email inbox. In case you're interested, check it out on github.

lessons

• Go has a slightly different and refreshening approach to deserializing/unmarshaling XML in encoding/xml. In the past I've mostly used tech similar to SAX/XPath/JAXB/..., compared to those Go's approach is pleasantly light-weight to get started (though understandably not light-weight compared to encoding/json). While using a light-weight approach, even more quirky cases were easy to solve with encoding/xml 👍

• Specifications are one thing, implementations another - an older lesson, but comes up every now and then 😉. In this case I was surprised to find feeds that mix tags from Atom and RSS.