As exactly zero people (presumably) have seen, I’m building a small app that returns subreddit’s ‘hot’ posts as RSS XML blobs which basically just allows your RSS reader of choice to ingest them and show off the links as if they were a normal RSS feed.
Partly due to my own “I want to build a thing” desire, and partly due to some feedback I’ve had, I would really like to develop this into an actual *thing* that people can use. But reddit’s lovely API policies present me with a bit of a challenge – if I use my keys I’m eventually going to get rate limited and automating account setup is increasingly difficult (believe me, I’ve tried).
So this leads me to Plan B – I let people make accounts, BYO API keys, and access feed endpoints like this;
https://<super cool domain name>/<catchy username>/<subreddit full of idiots>
The idea is that people should be able to simply add a new “feed” to their reader of choice by specifying a URL as above for any subreddit they’re interested in ingesting. There are also options for “no self posts”, and “SFW only” and probably a few other filters that can’t be reasonably accomplished by most feed readers.
This is going to require a bunch of extra infrastructure;
- Something to manage users, signups, and their private data (in this case API keys) in a secure manner.
- Something to allow for signup, and key/account management.
- Some real monitoring beyond the free tier of Betterstack.
Realistically with something akin to Firebase in play, this is actually fairly achievable with a platform like Digital Ocean. There’s minimal state to manage (and that can be outsourced cheaply), it’s very easy to wrap in a CDN, and it almost fully solves the API key problem so long as people don’t misconfigure their feed readers (and when they do, it only effects them!).
As always, the whole thing should be open source as much as possible and as of now I don’t think it’s something I could or should charge money for (might change in future when 20 million people sign up for it).
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