Reclaiming My RSS Workflow

For years, my RSS reading and my writing have lived in parallel worlds. I consume through feeds, but I publish through my blog. I am increasingly convinced that this separation makes no sense, at least for a segment of my RSS subscriptions.

I have been thinking about moving my RSS reading habits outside of FreshRSS and expanding my custom RSS feed reader to import my OPML from FreshRSS.

The goal is simple: build a fully custom RSS reader with a built-in authenticated Micropub feature, deeply integrated with #indiekit.

If you’re reading this, you cannot see those interaction buttons because you’re not logged in.

On my side, I can click a button and send any item I’m reading directly into my blog’s new post creation flow. This means I can quickly comment on any external URL I’m subscribed to, and I can do so as a native IndieWeb Like, Bookmark, Reply, Repost, or even a full blown Note or Article.

When I click this “post button” either on blogroll, podroll or news or in the backend with Microsub, I can select the post type in advance.

Based on that choice, it prefills the title and URL in the appropriate fields of the post creation flow.

This may seem trivial, but for me it changes everything. I have long wanted to collapse the distance between reading and publishing, between consuming feeds and participating in them. News should not live in one silo and my blog in another.

Concretely, I might be on my podroll page listening to a podcast episode and decide to react. In just a few clicks, I can publish a response on my blog and syndicate it to Bluesky and Mastodon. Reading becomes publishing. Subscribing becomes participating.

My RSS workflow becomes part of my writing workflow.

I figured that if I really want to blog more often about what I read, explore on the web or my coding experiments my blog would need to become a hub for me, not just a blog in the open.

What’s your setup?