I use Feedly to manage my content subscriptions, which include a number of bigger sites and personal blogs. Feedly is nice, but I would like to be able to save and use the data from there in other ways. So, I’ve been looking for an open source setup that I can tweak.

I’ve been trying to utilize IndieWeb pieces more and more. Their why really resonates with some of my frustrations with the current web (mainly auth and data ownership/portability). This site supports IndieAuth so I can login at supporting websites by giving my URL. The posts and contact card are also marked up with microformat to be parseable.

Experimenting with Aperture and Monocle

I decided to use Aperture for now as my microsub server. A microsub server is responsible for fetching the content you subscribe to and making it available in a common format for a microsub reader.

I was able to login and subscribe to Aaron Parecki’s personal site, which immediately loaded some 1600 entries for me. After adding a rel=microsub link to my homepage, I was able to log into Monocle and view that feed in my home channel. The default view for Monocle seems to be to show everything. There is an option to only show unread, but it’s not what you get by default.

Moving forward

Monocle doesn’t quite fit how I want to view updates, but it did help me understand the concepts better. The free hosted Aperture only saves your data for 7 days so I probably need to either host it myself or find a different microsub server.

I’ve been looking at ekster. I like that it’s a go binary and comes with a CLI. It has the option of importing an opml feed, which Feedly would export. It seems all of your channels and feeds are stored in a config file (that you can generate with the opml import) and redis is really meant to be a cache.

It does seem to support the follow action however and it doesn’t look like that updates the file. In the future, I’ll probably just try to run it and see what happens.

Ekster also has a reader associated with it, but there are a number of others to try including mobile apps.