An old idea, a new tool
I love the idea of RSS. That hasn’t really changed in twenty years. What changes is whether I’m actually keeping up with it, and the pattern is always the same: I subscribe to a healthy mix of feeds, read happily for a few months, then watch the high-volume sources start to dominate. Most days the backlog is manageable. Some days it isn’t, and the act of scanning headlines just to dismiss them is its own small drain. Eventually I drift away, the unread count climbs into four digits, and a year later I sheepishly wipe the slate and start over.
The fix has always seemed obvious to me: filter the firehose. Some sources post too much, and I only want a slice. I don’t want to unsubscribe — I want to subscribe to the parts I care about. A keyword include, an exclude, an author filter. That’s the whole feature.
I had this idea in 2012. I registered feedfilters.com in September of that year, fully intending to build a simple web service around it, and then… did nothing. The domain sat in my registrar account for fourteen years, renewing quietly, while I read and stopped reading and read and stopped reading. I’d half-forgotten I owned it.
What jogged me out of that loop was mundane. I was migrating my domains from Namecheap to Porkbun, going through the list one by one, and there it was: feedfilters.com. The same idea I’d had in 2012, still unbuilt, and as far as I could tell still not really solved by anyone else. So this time I decided to actually do it.
The other thing that changed is the tooling. I’ve been using Claude Code heavily, and a project I’d never quite felt I had the time to do right suddenly felt within reach. What you’re reading runs on the result. The pace has frankly surprised me — more working software, in less time, with more care taken on the design and infrastructure than a “side project” usually gets.
So that’s the concept, and that’s why now. Building this has been a genuinely interesting process, and I wanted somewhere to write down some of the design decisions and experiences along the way. That’s what this blog is for.