rssfilter 📰🔍

Have you ever wanted to filter an RSS feed? No? Well, I have. 🙋‍♂️

I subscribe to some "Planet" feeds, which are aggregations of blog posts from multiple authors. Sometimes you stumble upon contributors whose content just doesn't click with you. Wouldn't it be great if you could enjoy everyone else's posts without the clutter? 🤔

That's what this project does! 🎉 It takes an RSS feed and filters out items based on your preferences. Filter on:

• The title: Dodge specific names or keywords like a pro 📝
• The link: Swerve certain domains altogether 🔗
• The GUID: For when you need to get super specific with those pesky permalinks 🆔

Ready to take control of your RSS feed? Let's go!

Usage

An instance of rssfilter is running on https://rssfilter.orangesquash.org.uk/. This is public for anyone to use.

To use it, supply query parameters specifying the feed you want to filter and the filters you want to apply. Posts matching those filters will be excluded. Stick the URL in your feed reader and enjoy the peace and quiet 🍵.

The query parameters are:

• url: The URL of the feed you want to filter.
• title_filter_regex: A regular expression to filter the title of each item.
• link_filter_regex: A regular expression to filter the link of each item.
• guid_filter_regex: A regular expression to filter the GUID of each item.

All query parameters should be URL-encoded. The url and at least one filter are required. Each of the filters can be given multiple times to filter on multiple values.

For example, the url

https://rssfilter.orangesquash.org.uk/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fplanet.ubuntu.com%2Frss20.xml&link_filter_regex=https%3A%2F%2Fubuntu.com%2F%2Fblog

Will filter the Ubuntu Planet feed to exclude items from the official Ubuntu blog.

Running the project yourself

There are two ways to run this project.

lambda-rssfilter

lambda-rssfilter is a serverless function that filters an RSS feed. It's designed to be deployed to AWS. The Lambda is called over HTTP and receives an event with query parameters as described above, and uses the filter-rss-feed library to filter the feed.

Deploying lambda-rssfilter to AWS

See the README in the pulumi directory for instructions on deploying the Lambda function to AWS using the Pulumi code which is included in this repository.

filter-rss-feed

This is a binary, mainly used to testing the functionality of the core library, that you can run on your own machine. It takes an RSS feed URL and a list of regular expressions to filter out items. It will print the filtered feed to stdout. Why is that useful beyond testing? No idea. It would be better if it rendered the feed for the console or something.

Usage

$ rssfilter --help
rss_filter 0.1.0

USAGE:
    rssfilter [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <url>

FLAGS:
    -d, --debug
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -g, --guid-filter-regex <guid-filter-regex>
    -l, --link-filter-regex <link-filter-regex>
    -t, --title-filter-regex <title-filter-regex>

ARGS:
    <url>