IA Defensa Feed Ghost

A dual-purpose feed neutralization tool for browsing RSS/Atom feeds and accessing their entries via the Internet Archive—useful to avoid visiting or subscribing to sites that may excessively track you or otherwise not match your values.

1. Interactive feed viewer: A tool where you enter any feed URL and browse its entries, with each item linked to web.archive.org instead of the original site.
2. Automated feed neutralization service: Fork this repo, configure one or more feeds to follow, and a daily GitHub Action fetches them, rewrites all item links to web.archive.org, and publishes the modified feeds to your own GitHub Pages site so that you can follow the neutralized feeds in your feed reader.

1. Using the Interactive Feed Viewer

Visit Feed Ghost and paste any RSS or Atom feed URL into the input field. The tool will:

1. Fetch the feed (with a CORS proxy fallback if needed)
2. Display all entries with their titles and dates
3. Link each entry to https://web.archive.org/web/[original URL]
4. Show a secondary “Save to archive” link (https://web.archive.org/save/[original URL]) to trigger archiving of pages not yet captured

No data is stored or transmitted beyond what’s necessary to fetch and display the feed.

2. Setting Up Your Own Automated Feed Neutralization Service

This requires a GitHub account and takes about five minutes.

Privacy note: GitHub Pages is free only for public repositories. If your fork is public—which is required for free GitHub Pages—your config.json and the list of feeds you follow will be publicly visible. Keep this in mind before adding feeds you’d prefer not to disclose.

a. Fork This Repository

Click Fork on the GitHub repository page. All subsequent steps happen in your fork.

b. Create and Edit config.json

Copy config.example.json to config.json and replace the example entry with your feeds:

{
  "feeds": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/feed.xml",
      "name": "Example Blog"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://another.com/rss"
    }
  ]
}

Once done, commit the changes to your fork.

Working with a copy allows you to work on your fork and still pull updates from the original repository.

Fields:

Field	Required	Description
url	Yes	Full URL to an RSS 2.0 or Atom feed
name	No	Display name for the feed. Falls back to the feed’s <title> if omitted

Changing the schedule:

The workflow runs daily by default and it’s recommended to keep the schedule light. To change the schedule, edit the cron: line in .github/workflows/feeds.yml. (Tools like crontab.guru can help build a custom expression.)

c. Enable GitHub Pages

1. Go to your fork’s Settings → Pages. (If Actions are disabled in your fork, enable them first under Actions → Enable.)
2. Under Source, select Deploy from a branch.
3. Choose branch: main, folder: / (root).
4. Click Save.

Your feeds will be available at https://[your-username].github.io/feed-ghost/feeds/.

d. Run the Action for the First Time

The workflow runs automatically each day, but you can trigger it immediately:

1. Go to Actions → Update feeds
2. Click Run workflow → Run workflow

The workflow will fetch your configured feeds, rewrite their item links, and commit the results to feeds/ and a generate-feeds.log summary to your repository. GitHub Pages will then redeploy automatically.

e. Locating Your Feeds

After the workflow runs:

• https://[your-username].github.io/feed-ghost/feeds/—index of all feeds
• https://[your-username].github.io/feed-ghost/feeds/[slug].xml—individual feeds, where [slug] is derived from the feed’s name or title

The feed files are valid RSS/Atom XML with item links rewritten to https://web.archive.org/web/[original URL]. You can subscribe to the feeds in any feed reader.

Notes

• Feed format support: RSS 2.0 and Atom are supported. Older RSS 0.9x variants may work, but other formats (RSS 1.0, JSON Feed) do not.
• Archive availability: Not all URLs may have an archived copy on web.archive.org. The “Save to archive” link and prefixed links will open whatever the Internet Archive has—or its “Save Page Now” interface if nothing is captured yet.
• CORS: Most feed servers do not send CORS headers, so the viewer automatically retries via corsproxy.io when a direct fetch fails. When the proxy is used, your request—including your IP address and browser metadata—is sent to corsproxy.io along with the feed URL.
• Private feeds: Feeds behind authentication are not supported.