Feed Readers: A Radical Take on Nostalgia

I developed an application for my friends as a part of their college assignment for their CS 673: Software Design and Production Methodology class. It was a news feed reader, it didn’t seem particularly challenging. All I had to do was fetch the news from Feedly, display those articles on our application, and call it a day. This took me a couple of hours to develop the UI, but what was a bit challenging at first was to get the API, and get it to work. I never really worked with external APIs cleanly, and this was my learning opportunity.

Let’s talk about the money, I charged each of them $50, so I was rich that month, I got a total of $250 that day. Now, let’s talk performance. It was crap, to put it mildly. I had a UI that separated the articles by sections and fetched those sections in separate requests. But the fetch requests were made in `Promise.all`. Had you ever written a single piece of JavaScript code, you’d know you should never do that. This gave us at least 5 to 7 seconds of delay in the response with multiple loading spinners on the page for each section.

Years later, I've seen countless RSS readers with complex UIs and cluttered content. It’s surprising how many apps focus on being flashy or feature-packed, while barely addressing core user needs—especially for creators. They’re missing what I think could be a transformative feature: empowering authors by showcasing their work across all platforms in one place. This got me thinking: what if we had a reader centered around authors and their content, giving readers a chance to engage with the authors they love across all platforms?

Ideation

As someone who writes on both Substack and Medium, I’ve felt the frustration of having content scattered across platforms. I want readers to find all my articles with ease, no matter where they're published. This desire for seamless access to an author’s work inspired the idea for an author-centric RSS feed reader—a place that aggregates content from every platform an author uses.

Author-centric Reader

The concept of an author-centric reader could be an interesting problem to solve. it needs to keep track of all the articles of an author, tag those articles based on their content, and recommend authors based on the followers/readers.

An author-centric feed reader flips the script. Instead of readers managing endless lists of feeds, the authors themselves take the lead, bringing their latest articles from various platforms into one cohesive feed. This setup could not only improve visibility but also allow readers to follow authors seamlessly across all of their content, from tech articles on Medium to personal reflections on Substack.

With this author-centric reader, I hope to recapture the simplicity and focus that made me fall in love with feed readers while empowering authors in a new way. It’s my answer to a question I started pondering back in that college assignment: how can we make feed readers more meaningful, more personal, and ultimately, more impactful?