Story

It's been nice seeing some RSS projects pop up lately, so here's mine and the scope creep that led to it.

I wanted to read a couple feeds from their beginnings, something RSS doesn't particularly do and nobody particularly uses it for. But I've done the keep-a-tab-open-for-8-months thing more than once to work through an archive, and I don't fancy doing it again. As I worked through the steps and showed it to friends, we accumulated some other quality-of-life use cases that fit well enough into "just filter some XML" that they glommed on.

So, Sponder can:

- Run basic filtering on RSS feeds, either by keywords or regular expressions.

- Parse any webpage into an RSS feed, including autodetection of title/image/link/etc elements, following page links back through history, and coming back for new items later.

- Control the pace of that full historical feed to serve you an article per week, or 12 per day, whatever pace you like.

- Automatically detect and filter rerun episodes from a podcast feed.

- Be configured either by UI or typing some YAML.

It does not:

- Replace your RSS or podcast client, it's middleware that publishes a modified feed for you.

- Replace every one of your feeds, just the ones you wish were different. Though you can important and export OPMLs if you wish a lot were different.

- Run content through LLMs, though I'm considering it for rerun detection since metadata similarity only gets so far.

I'd love to hear from you fine folks:

- What bugs you about your feeds

- How configuring a flow goes