A quick app to read RSS feeds from external sources and display them on the page. Three sample feeds are included as demos, along with the ability to add a fourth (which isn't saved).

When clicked, links are expanded to reveal the additional content contained in the feed, as well as a link to the original article. Any images in the feed are displayed directly in the page with styling to prevent them taking over the screen.

I've just created a feed reader in PHP and Javascript to quickly view favourite sites. It's also possible once signed in to manage your own feeds so that only you can view them, and also to not see the default ones I have added.

On the feed, you get the usual title and links sections so when you click it takes you to the article. When hovering over the feed, you also get the option to expand the feed list to view older articles (assuming the RSS feed goes longer than 10 articles), or to view the article itself - if the article is included in the description tags on the RSS feed, which is the standard. As it relies on other people's sites being done in the same way, little sections don't work, but I've added some exceptions to help work around those. It's set up so that if a website is down where the feed is hosted, it will skip that one and continue, rather than breaking the whole page.

My main reason for creating it is that I couldn't find a reader that worked exactly how I wanted - so I decided it was easier to make my own. The closest I have found to a reader I want is Newsrack for the iPhone, which I like, although when you're sat at a PC, it's pretty pointless looking at your phone.

Next step will be to improve the speed (Firefox Beta 7 helps a little for this), as it gets a bit clunky at times. The code also needs tidying up as I've been tweaking and refining. As it's only me working on it so haven't felt the need to clean up or comment my scripts like I normally would. I may change the styling slightly for an iPhone version, although the app I mentioned does a good job already I probably won't bother, unless it unexpectedly becomes amazingly popular. Loading icons would be handy too, so you know it's trying to do something (or the internet has broken).

Update: Loading icons have now been added. Also included a sidebar to add favourite links that you can return to later - works when signed in and not, so you can either have a personalised set of bookmarks, or a public set that anyone can use. Added a history too, to keep track of which sites have been updated since you last visited the page. Optimised the loading and animation a little, but it still needs the code tidying up further, It's getting there!


Handily, the loading is done with jQuery, so you only load the page once and everything animates within the page whenever you click on something.

Have a play here.