The KDO Rolodex Is Now a Wee Feed Reader?

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the bugs & irritations”. So onto some things that you folks can actually use.

When I launched the KDO Rolodex last July, it was a simple list of five recommended sites on the front page of the site. You could refresh to see more sites, but you couldn’t see the whole list all at once. Fun, but lots of room for improvement.

Over the weekend, I launched the full list of sites (186 at the moment) for your perusal. Any visitor to the site can see the sites & people I read to help make KDO. I’ve written before about why this is important to me:

I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators.

I loved seeing the whole list. So I kept pushing made something I’ve had on my todo list for awhile: I turned the Rolodex into a tiny RSS feed reader. Which I love even more. The feed reader feature is a bit rough around the edges, so I’m making available only to members while we beta test it. Here’s what it looks like:

The three latest posts from each site or person are listed below their name; clicking on a post title will open the post in a new tab. You can obviously click on the name of the site/person to open that in a new tab too. Sites are sorted by most recently updated (this is true of the public listing as well). If you’re a member, please check it out and kick the tires.

For the curious, some details about the implementation. I use Feedbin as my feed reader and they have a pretty good API. So I built a sync system that adds the URLs of the sites in the Rolodex (if they have associated feeds) to Feedbin and tags them with “Rolodex”. Once the feeds are associated with sites, I can just retrieve new entries from those Rolodex-tagged feeds (every 30 min currently). There are a few sites causing problems — for instance, Beehiiv newsletters don’t appear to have RSS feeds by default?¹ — and there are some other bugs, but I’m working on it. I’m not including posts from social sites (Bluesky, Mastodon) for now because that’s another level of velocity.

But like I said, I am loving this casual wee feed reader so far. No read/unread statuses, no counts, no folders, no pressure to catch up, no 3-pane view. I’d say 90-95% of the sites on the list work fine — and it doesn’t need to be 100%. Try it out, lemme know what you think.

Thanks to KDO members for helping to fund new features like this. If you’d like to help support the site, check out your membership options here. ✌️

1. If you try adding Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter (hosted by Beehiiv) to Feedbin, it can’t find an RSS feed because there’s no link tag for it. The front page of the site doesn’t link to the feed anywhere. But if you dig around in the source code… ah, there it is. Same deal with Bobby Solomon’s new Horstman newsletter, except the RSS feed address isn’t anywhere in the source. 🤷‍♂️ So posts for those sites won’t show for now. ↩

• Feedbin
• kottke.org
• RSS