plainfeeder

Simple RSS Feed Reader designed in PHP. Mostly a learning exercise, but hopefully a useful service too!

Planned Features

• Basic User authentication
• Retrieve RSS feeds using best practices for HTTP calls
  • Honor caching headers and properly perform If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match calls (if Last-Modified and ETag response headers are provided)
  • If multiple users add the same feed, don't try to fetch the feed multiple times, just use what we already have
  • Honor rate limits and other status codes imposed by the feed owner
• Sane refresh times for feeds to prevent overloading the source server with multiple requests
• Plain site layout, it's mostly text-based content so it should use a text-based reader

Technologies

I'm not an expert developer by any stretch of the imagination. I know Python fairly well and I've worked with PHP for a few years but I've never used any frameworks for anything. I don't intend to start that now either. This site is going to be built with some fairly basic technology - it doesn't need much to be honest.

• Nginx Web Server
  • Let's Encrypt will be the certificate provider
• PHP-FPM
  • Various required modules will also be installed and used as necessary
• MariaDB
  • Store user credentials
  • Store feed information

Once I have a better understanding of the overall design of these various systems, I'll be sure to include a little write up of how things are laid out and the reasoning for that. I will again preface with this - I am not a developer by trade, but I wanted a project to work on and I've been really enjoying finding RSS feeds lately, so figured this would be a fun one to start with!

Site Layout

This is going to be a massive work in progress while I flesh out the best way for me to handle this. For the time being, I generally see a layout looking like this (from the view of this repo):

• /public/
  • Anything contained in here is available to be rendered to users
• /includes/
  • Any libraries that I have written or imported for use that are not intended to be accessed directly
• /private/
  • Files used to handle server-side processes only
  • Initially will be used for the logic to retrieve feed data, since this will not require any user-facing interaction

Contact Me

If you'd like to reach out to me, you can either email at the address in my Github profile or at chris@plainfeeder.com