I wanted to start using rss more but I didn’t like how most rss readers update all feeds at the same time, leading to a possible traffic analysis profile. So I programmed my own Reader. Using Pythonista on iOS I created an extremely useful and privacy rich program. It uses the Python requests library which only downloads the html on the requested page along with feed parser. There is zero JavaScript and only loads the rss articles of the feed I want to view. Requests also allows you to submit any user agent in the header along with using a socks proxy if I wanted to add even more anonymity other than my vpn. The Referer is set to empty along with a timeout of 10 seconds in case there is some problem with the page load. Once the code downloads the static page, it strips out only the text I want to view. It removes any links, or other website information that isn’t relevant to the article. Because it doesn’t download any images there are no tracking pixels or uniquely generated image links that could be loaded like traditional rss readers. I added a bunch of user agents which are randomly selected at the start of the script. It only loads the page that I requested so there aren’t any redirects. Once the page has been formatted it saves it as a static HTML page which is then opened with the iOS Quick Look. I forked the code so I can also use it in the share sheet to open any link I want. I’ve found it works on most websites that don’t employ captcha’s.
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