Custom RSS feeds
Create mashups of posts and topics you're interested in
I’ve been building blaze.email for a couple of years now. Basically it’s an email digest that curates links to interesting tech blog posts from the past week, across a few different popular topics (gen AI, obvs). Part of doing this requires automatically parsing, categorising and creating text embeddings for each post so they can be screened for relevance. I’ve indexed about 1.3M blog posts over time and have been looking for ways to make all of this more useful, so I started by creating a basic blog search engine at blognerd.app:
So far so standard, quite a few places already let you do this. A few distinguishing features are that you can
search similar posts or similar blogs by clicking the grey pills in the results
turn any content search into an RSS feed
search RSS feeds directly and find similar authors
Custom RSS
The big new thing here is the ability to customise feeds. It’s somewhat inspired by Yahoo! pipes which among other things let you mash together feeds from the web using a graphical interface. Here’s how it looks on blognerd.app
It’s pretty simple. You draw flowchart by dragging nodes onto the canvas. Every flow chart needs to start with at least one ‘Input’ which specifies a search query, and each flow needs to end with a single RSS output. You can add keyword filter steps to add / remove things you are / aren’t interested in. I think turning searches into feeds is powerful on it’s own, but I really like the ability to tweak RSS feeds and adding as many different topic sources as you like.
I’m leaving it completely open while I develop it, as I’m really keen to get any ideas or feedback on it. Please give me a shout if you have any thoughts - you can find me on Mastodon or Bluesky