RSS Tinkering Notes

RSS Tinkering Notes#

On March 7th, I had no classes in the afternoon and was free. After getting bored of playing Vampire Survivor, I decided to try the server that I had previously failed to set up.

First, I tried AZURE, but the student verification didn't pass, so I gave up. Then I tried Alibaba Cloud. They have a Flying Acceleration 3.0 - University Program, which allows you to get seven months of ECS. It went quite smoothly.

After getting it, the first thing I thought of was to set up my own RSS service. Basically, I followed the instructions in Can't Find a Satisfactory RSS Service? You Can Build Your Own to complete it. However, there were still some twists and turns along the way, and I encountered some problems.

The first issue was with the network. The addresses provided in the article were all on GitHub, but the download speed was really slow. It took over half an hour to download a 16MB file. There are two ways to solve this. The first attempt was to use a mirror site, but the mirror site I tried had issues, and I also wanted to set up a Telegram bot on the server later on. So I chose to use a proxy. I referred to How to Make Alibaba Cloud Servers in China Download GitHub Code at High Speed and the tutorial from the airport I used. But I'm still not sure how to change the node. I know now and have recorded it in Network.
The second issue was that the docker-compose configuration file for ttrss provided in the article had problems, and the things I downloaded after modifying it were also incorrect. Then I thought of just copying it directly. But I'm not familiar with vim operations, and the yml format has strict requirements for indentation, so I struggled with it for a while.
(I found out that I was being foolish. GitHub provides the corresponding download method: click "raw", and the redirected URL is what you need. For example, the code I needed for this step is curl -fLo a.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HenryQW/Awesome-TTRSS/main/docker-compose.yml)
After starting the container, according to the description, I should be able to directly see the web frontend of Tiny Tiny RSS by accessing {server IP}:181. But it showed a 502 error. Later, I realized that the default port 181 is not open, so I added it in the security group.
Choosing a reader also took me a lot of time. First, I tried using "Fluent Reader" that I had been using for a while, but it didn't work with the address provided in the documentation. Then I chose "TTRSS-Reader", which went smoothly, but the interface was a bit old-fashioned and the functionality was not sufficient, or maybe I just haven't discovered it yet. So I switched to using "FeedMe". At first, I used the TTRSS API, but the problem was that the subscription address could come through, but the content couldn't be fetched. I found out from the issue that this was a bug that appeared several months ago and hasn't been fixed yet. The solution was to switch to the fever API. But this was also a pitfall. First, the address given on the website was http:/[your address]/plugins.local/fever/, while the address given in the documentation was https://[your address]/plugins/fever. However, it may be that different readers have different filtering methods. The address that "FeedMe" can use is http://[your address]/, while "Fluent Reader" is http://[your address]//plugins/fever/.

These are the problems I encountered during the entire setup process. Currently, I have found that "FeedMe" has significantly more features, and I also want to use RSSHub and expand the subscription sources beyond personal blogs.