RSS Dash was a dashboard for RSS feed widgets, intended as an “iGoogle” replacement.

iGoogle was my browser home page for years. I mainly used it to keep track of several blogs and webcomics through its handy RSS widgets. Unfortunatly Google, as they are wont to do, decided to shut it down. I didn’t want to give up my RSS feeds, so I built a replacement for the RSS widgets.

RSS Dash required you to make a user account using email address and password. You could then add RSS feed URLs to the dashboard. It would pull the title as well as the 5 latest entires from the feed and display them in a widget. Widgets could be moved around on the dashboard, or deleted. This was essentially the whole functionality of the site.

It never saw much usage aside from myself and a few friends, but required virtually no maintenance. In 2020 I did decide to shut it down after I had resized the mostly disused server to save some money. Now running on a single virtual CPU core, this had the side effect of making RSS Dash extremely slow to load. Checking into active users over the past few months (2), I decided a better use of my time would be to shut it down instead of re-engineering it to be more efficient.

Technologies Involved

• Ruby on Rails
• feedjira (library to process with RSS feeds)
• MySQL (through Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord)
• HTML / CSS (SCSS) / JavaScript (and jQuery)
• git
• ssh / tmux for general server admin
• nginx