Replied to a thread by James King (Twitter)

Started tinkering with building a feed reader again.

Baffled to find that some of the feeds I subscribe to have 300-500 items in them for no good reason.

(e.g. a web comic or a news site with like the last 2-4 years worth of items listed)
— Les Orchard (@lmorchard) December 28, 2018

Have you ever considered just using Newsboat and then building a web interface on top of it for mobile reading? I have been thinking about doing that myself recently.
— James King (@elroyjetson) December 28, 2018

Huh, I'd never actually heard of Newsboat until now. For a bunch of years, building a feed reader was my go-to learning project for new web dev frameworks
— Les Orchard (@lmorchard) December 28, 2018

It is mostly a terminal based app, but it handles the crapy stuff like RSS and Atom parsing. Stores everything in an SQLite3 DB. You can still use it as a learning project, but not have to deal with the yuck part.
— James King (@elroyjetson) December 28, 2018

This sounds a lot like the Microsub spec which abstracts and separates the parsing and displaying of content. There are already several separate server and reader implementations if you’re interested in tinkering.