Every morning, (no about 5-10 times a day), I go through news aggregators like news.ycombinator.com, lwn.net, etc. Scrolling down non-stop, skimming through the articles which amuse me, and vehemently some, which were written with a completely opposite mindset. Once I’m done with them, I go to Twitter, and scroll past news from the football, earth observation, and the Python community.

This takes about 5-10 minutes every iteration, and then for a moment, I gaze into the void created by the realization that I’ve consumed every bit of news available. While in reality, I took nothing home from the knowledge gathered for public by the mankind on that day.

Unlike folks who started using the interweb since early 00s or late 90s, I first used the internet in 2011, so the idea of news feeds took me about 9 years to wrap my head around with.

It’s about necessity I believe. Until now, I was in a school/college, I had people around to talk to, sports to play in my spare time, and playgrounds to run about on. During the pandemic, since I lost those options, I started spending a lot of time on the internet. Earlier, I only turned to the internet when I’d be programming, to seek help from StackOverFlow, push code to GitHub, some accompanying music in another tab, and occasionally r/ponds, r/disneyeyes for sanity. I never read a lot on the web for ‘fun’. There were the occasional engineering blogs by individual hackers, programming communities, engineering teams of commercial organizations, but I never felt an urge to await the next one from them.

I can’t exactly pinpoint to when in the last few months, but I started using the reading list feature on Safari. See, I’ve been bookmarking for years, but I have unread articles in my bookmarks folder which were put there in 2014. Bookmarks were too tedious to open, a browser doesn’t shove all the bookmarks in your face, of course it tries not to piss you off. Safari’s reading list however has a charming UX, there’s a button on the top-left corner, which keeps peeking at you, and if you open it, bam! All the stuff you’ve saved to read, opens up on the left bar, as a list, with some preview.

Over time, I found myself going to the same weblogs, and for the last month, I’ve passively tried to register with a feed aggregator. I’ve seen some online options, like feedly. Its title says, ‘Say goodbye to information overload’. Ironically, the first few things I saw while using the trial version are ‘topics’ to find feeds from. Seriously? :/

Then I searched for some open-source self-hosting feed aggregators. This was my first attempt to self-host a software I’d be using on a near-regular basis. After all, we all want to be as cool as this person. My search was long, since I wanted the aggregator to have minimalistic UI, be built with Python/Go, so that if I wish to tweak it in future, I can do it with minimal effort.

I’ve been using miniflux for about a week now, and I couldn’t be happier. The setup was easy. If you’ve docker-compose installed, you can set miniflux up with this.

version: '3'
services:
  miniflux:
    image: miniflux/miniflux:latest
    ports:
      - "8888:8080"
    depends_on:
      - db
    environment:
      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:secret@db/miniflux?sslmode=disable
      - RUN_MIGRATIONS=1
      - CREATE_ADMIN=1
      - ADMIN_USERNAME={admin_username}
      - ADMIN_PASSWORD={admin_password}
  db:
    image: postgres:latest
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER={postgres_user}
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD={postgres_password}
    volumes:
      - miniflux-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
  miniflux-db:

Do a docker-compose up, go to http://localhost:8888 and have fun!

Now I get a lot less anxious, with all my readings and podcasts tracked at a single place which I only go through right before and after my work. And the bonus fact that nobody’s tracking my aggregation makes it even better.

Here’s a list of feeds I follow, send me yours, and I’d love to explore the ones that you love.

Good day reader, here’s Arati Saha and a beautiful stamp :)