Make your own

This page is a list of the latest posts from the sites I follow. You can have one of your own, with your own sites, in about ten minutes. It costs nothing, there’s nothing to install, and nothing to keep running: GitHub builds the page every so often and publishes it for you.

You need a GitHub account, which is free. You don’t need to know how to code — your list of sites is one line per site in a text file.

Set it up

1. Make your copy. Open the newsfeed template and press the green Use this template button, then Create a new repository. Give it a name (newsfeed is a fine one), leave it Public, and press Create. Public is what makes the page free to publish; the only thing in it is your list of sites.
2. Turn on publishing. In your new repository, go to Settings → Pages, and under Source choose GitHub Actions.
3. Turn on the builds. Go to the Actions tab and press the button that enables workflows. Choose Build and deploy on the left, then Run workflow.
4. Open your page. A minute or so later it’s at https://<your username>.github.io/<your repository>/. It starts with a handful of sites so there’s something to look at.

Add your own sites

Your page has its own Add or remove sites page, the same as this one. Paste a site’s address, press Add, and press Create on the GitHub page that opens: a minute later it’s on your page. Removing one works the same way.

Or edit the list directly: news/feeds.txt in your repository, one site per line.

• Any site with a feed: paste its home page, like https://kottke.org/. The build finds the feed itself. Most news sites and blogs have one.
• YouTube channels: paste the channel’s page. Its videos play on your page, in a small window you can drag around, and Shorts are left out.
• Podcasts: paste the show’s feed, and its episodes open in Apple Podcasts.

Anything after the address is the name to show, and then options:

• limit=5 — at most 5 posts from that site, for one that posts constantly.
• days=14 — keep its posts for 14 days, for a blog that posts rarely. The usual is 3.
• only="Full Performance" — only posts whose titles have that in them.

So a line can be as plain as https://waxy.org/ or as fussy as https://www.nytimes.com/ The New York Times limit=8.

How often it updates

The build is set to run every 15 minutes, but GitHub treats scheduled builds as a favour rather than a promise and skips most of them — often nine in ten — so your page can sit a few hours out of date. Two ways around it:

• Press the button. Actions → Build and deploy → Run workflow updates it at once.
• Have something else start it. A free account at cron-job.org can ask GitHub to build every 15 minutes, which is what keeps this page current. The template’s README has the exact settings.

If something looks wrong

• A site you added isn’t there. It may not publish a feed. Look for an RSS or Atom link on the site and paste that address instead.
• A site says “couldn’t load”. Its posts from the last good build keep showing for two days. Some sites turn away anything that isn’t a person with a browser; those can’t be read.
• Nothing updates at all. Check the Actions tab for a red build and open it to see what failed.