I was reading the U.K. government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) evaluation of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities after tapping the link in a post on Mastodon. After scanning it, I wondered why I didn’t have the blog in my Inoreader RSS feed, when I got reminded by Inoreader as to the reason:
AISI sadly uses WebFlow (I have no idea why anyone uses that daft platform for blog content; I helped maintain the blog for my previous employer for the first two years of my employ there and WebFlow is just plain terrible bloatware.), and you have to do some machinations to get it to also spit out an RSS feed from their “collections”.
I tapped the “Create Web feed” button (TIL “Sentence case” for buttons is the widely recommended default, made popular by Google’s Material Design, Apple’s HIG, and other contemporary design systems) since that’s one reason I use Inoreader (yes, I know FreshRSS can do that too but I’m a die-hard Inoreader user):
Even before their use of “AI”, Inoreader was pretty good at finding the right HTML elements to use as components for a scraped feed.
I happily tapped “Follow feed” button:
and then remembered why it was not in my feed.
I am not giving Inoreader any more money just for the privilege of having more programmtic RSS feeds. So, I headed over to Val Town. In their own parlance, it’s the “Zapier for know-code engineers”. I’ve been using them off and on for a few years because the CEO is a great communicator, understands builders, and is neither afraid of “AI” nor has “AI Psychosis” (like a few of my former work colleages desperately, obviously have).
Val Town has had their own agent — Townie — since I started using their service. Even a few years ago, they did a a bang up job with it’s system prompts and tools that it ended up being a great way to both shortcut create a quick app, and then quickly add features to any app. It also comes with SQLite databases for each Val, the ability to run jobs on a timer, and a bunch more features (this post is not an advert for Val Town, so you can poke at what else it has on your own).
I looked at the HTML structure (NOTE: if you come across a WebFlow-based blog, do “view source” vs “inspect element” since they do love their needless post-load javascript machinations), and then gave Townie this prompt:
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog has no RSS feed. We need to build a Val that will expose an RSS feed for it.
The structure is clean and highly iterable—each entry has consistent element ordering. You can reliably grab generics by index since they appear in the same sequence for every entry.
Let's use SQLite to keep a database of blog entries and run this once every day to scrape and store the latest entries then when a user requests the RSS feed, we can serve it from the database.
~Three-minutes later, the feed had a landing page
an actual RSS feed: https://hrbrmstr—a9fd1110460d11f1b63242b51c65c3df.web.val.run/feed, and entries in Inoreader:
The Val Town cron job was automatically set up and given a first run, and I even have a nice architecture flowchart:
| File | Type | Role |
|---|---|---|
feed.ts | HTTP | Serves RSS at /feed and a landing page at / |
cron.ts | Interval | Runs daily to scrape the blog |
scraper.ts | Script | Parses the Webflow HTML using Cheerio, upserts to SQLite |
rss.ts | Script | Generates valid RSS 2.0 XML from the database |
main.ts | Script | One-time DB schema setup (already run) |
By default, Val Town projects are public, so you can see all the work Townie did.
If you bring your own agent (which I could have done with Ollama-via-OpenCode wired up to Val Town’s excellent MCP or CLI), Val Town is free (though access to Townie, the ability to have private Vals, custom domains, and more is 100% worth the super cheap annual sub).
I didn’t even bother to spend the same likely three-minutes digesting how much Inoreader would have wanted to charge me so I could get more programmatic feed credits. It likely would have cost as much as the Val Town annual sub, where I get unlimited programmatic RSS feeds for free.
While Townie was cranking, I also used OpenCode and MiniMax 2.7 to wire up a proper Golang feed generator for the AISI blog so I can self-host it for “free” in the event Val Town ever goes away.
If Inoreader’s (or any other SaaS) business model relies on nickle-and-diming users for features like this, they have no moat. In fact, I can help drain this particular moat by offering to set up programamtic feeds for anyone (yay unlimited Vals) if they run into a sad blog or site that refuses to do the right thing and have RSS feeds.