RSS Parcel and custom Chrome extensions

RSS Parcel and custom Chrome extensions

I’ve long loved consuming information via RSS feeds, with my first post about it way back in 2008 and a post from 2022 giving a pretty solid overview of things.

Between my love of RSS and my constant tinkering with vibe-coding through Lovable, I figured I’d try writing my own RSS reader app — and it worked!

I built RSS Parcel, but this post isn’t really about that. I think it’s a great app and you’re welcome to try it out, but like most vibe-coded apps it’s a great app for the person that created it. This is the perfect RSS app for me, but your mileage may vary.

However, this process taught me two important things:

First, tools like Lovable are getting really really good. I was able to spin up this core app very quickly, though it’s admittedly taken some work to get the feeds to load consistently.

Second, creating a custom Chrome extension was far easier than I expected. I heard a podcast recently say “if you’re just getting started with vibe-coding, simply build a Chrome extension“. I assumed that building Chrome extensions would be kind of tricky, so I simply hadn’t even considered building one, and it turned out to be pretty easy. I suspect I’ll be creating more soon. 🙂

For me, the Chrome extension allows me to take articles and toss them into RSS Parcel as a “read-it-later” kind of thing. It was super simple to build and it works great.

As always, my encouragement to you is to go play. Try out Lovable or Claude Code or one of the other 50 apps that do this. Build an app to fix a sore spot. Build a Chrome extension. Playing with this stuff is the best way to learn, so get out there and make something fun.

When you do, let me know about it so I can check it out!