How I converted RSS to Instagram stories

#android #mobile #ios

RSS is quite old technology, but still many people use it. I like RSS, but RSS apps are old fashioned and uncomfortable for me. There are much better designs to read a content than boring news list. The one of them are stories. You may know this from Instagram or Snapchat. So, I decided to create a converter.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    ...
    <item>
        <title>Title</title>
        <link>link.html</link>
        <description>Description</description>
        <pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        <!-- But, where is an image? 😣 -->
    </item>
    ...

I wanted to put a title and a short description in each story. Almost all RSS channels deliver this data. But the main problem is with pictures of articles. Some channels delivers pictures, but most don't. I think, the most important in the stories are images. The picture passes quicker information than the text, and I think this is the heart of stories. So what do with feeds witch don't provide images?

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
    <head>
        ...
        <meta property="og:title" content="Title" />
        <meta property="og:image" content="image.jpg" />
        <!-- Ok, I see an image now! 😍 -->
        ...

We can find the cover image in... HTML social tags of the article. I noticed that, almost every news website has social tags. So I created RSS reader with scraping feature. The result is awesome. I have thousands RSS feeds with nice cover images now.

This is a short story how I created Stories Now. 🚀 Modern RSS Reader. It's available for Android and iOS for free. You may download it from: