The problem

I like reading news via feed aggregators - and after the demise of Google Reader, I've migrated to Feedly. Which is great by itself, and doesn't even need me to provide an URL of teh feed - it can use site URL, or even site name, to provide one.

Also, I read some (very limited) streams on Reddits, such as r/programming/ - but the problem is, if I use just the feed directly, it points me to a post on Reddit, which I find fairly useless: I don't care about comments, I mostly care about the content of the articles people post.

So I wanted clicks on the item to lead me directly to the article, skipping the Reddit post.

The solution

The solution I came up with was to host a simple proxy that would accept feed name, get the feed XML from Reddit, parse it, replace the post URL with article URL, and return the results. Since I have some apps running here and there, I could put it on a server, so I didn't need to be concerned about CORS requests or any other browser security constraints.

So the result is a simple Python app that uses Bottle as HTTP server framework. It doesn't do much, but it does what I need it to: https://github.com/hydralien/tools/tree/master/reddit-streamline.

Example: https://pidging.hydralien.net/direddit/r/programming/.rss.

It actually existed for a few years now, I just finally decided to upgrade it to Python3 and thought of posting it here.