gobbler

3 posts

'One Month In'

Gobbler’s Month One Update:

Gobbler is one month old. Overall, it’s been a stable first month, with user numbers growing and a few interesting events along the way.

Stability

According to DigitalOcean, Gobbler had over 99% uptime. There was the odd latency spike from distant regions (think us_east to se_asia), but nothing worrying. The database is also performing well as the number of entries grows (at time of writing, ~150,000).

Success, 403s, and 404s When You Least Expect Them

Despite initially working fine, *.substack.com and medium.com feeds stopped working in their entirety in weeks three and four, respectively. This has largely been resolved by routing fetches to these domains via Cloudflare egress. Gobbler has also been submitted to Cloudflare’s Bot Verification Program, which should make the egress workaround a thing of the past.

youtube.com feeds are special. For most of the day they’ll work fine, then they’ll 404 for a few hours, then they’ll work fine again. It’s a known issue and there doesn’t appear to be a solution.

The only other problematic sites belong to, or are partnered with, IGN Entertainment. We have reached out to IGN to see if this can be resolved. However, as these sites are protected by Cloudflare, Bot Verification is hopefully the long-term solution.

Outside of the above, 5% of feeds are not reachable due to network errors, and Gobbler’s article fetch success rate sits at 84%.

Improvements in Month 1

  • New accounts: switched from email/password to social sign-in (Apple, Microsoft, Google) and app passwords
  • Implemented WebSub support
  • Improved newsletter rendering

Introducing Gobbler

One of my side projects, Gobbler, made it out of the oven just over a week ago. It’s a web-based RSS reader that offers a Google Reader-compatible API and even more functionality via a REST API to third-party clients.

Gobbler builds on the traditional RSS reader functionality (Feeds, Feed-level management, and Starred articles) with:

  • Lists, for organising articles
  • Annotations, for highlighting text within articles
  • Markdown export, for saving and viewing articles in other applications
  • Newsletter support
  • Custom typography 1

Gobbler has a 14-day free trial and then it’s just $5/month. If you use NetNewsWire, Current, or Reeder (Classic), Gobbler already works! If not, you can use Gobbler in your browser or as an installable Web app on your device.

  1. I spent a long time selecting which font to use for the sans serif. In the end it was a tie between Die Grotesk and Geograph, both from Klim, and Geograph won. ↩

Gobbler — Early Access

I’m thinking about releasing a new web-based RSS reader and RSS aggregator called Gobbler. It’s available to test for the next month or so and you can sign up using this link. Everything is still in sandbox, so you won’t be charged for Stripe. All data will be removed at the end of March.

If you want to use Gobbler on mobile:

  • Reeder: Use Google Reader
  • NetNewsWire: Use FreshRSS
  • Current: Use FreshRSS
  • *or *just add it to your Home Screen from Safari

Gobbler on Desktop

Gobbler on iPhone

You can find out more about Gobbler at gobbler.press.

If you have feedback—I’d be delighted to hear it—please send to support@gobbler.press.