Hey folks, this is not directly related to NeXT, but I am currently working on making legacy iOS 6 and Mac OS X Leopard devices usable in the real world. As part of this process, I realized that RSS/Atom is a huge "escape hatch" for me. In that, if a website has an RSS feed, then any RSS reader can read it. Also, it will enable iTunes to fetch podcasts which also use RSS. I don't think there was ever an RSS reader for OpenStep, but if there were, it would work.
Of course, what is the problem? TLS... Whether its expired or Certificate Authorities or old TLS versions, many websites have just opted to only support new standards and not fall back to HTTP when it all falls down (which makes no sense in my mind because TheVerge is not a fucking banking website, but I digress). So I wanted to make a super simple RSS proxy that I can run as a Cloudflare worker for free to rewrite all the URLs in an RSS feed to use the proxy... and I have an alpha available now. It works for RSS and Atom and actually also has a basic HTML proxy.
I don't have much documentation yet, and I don't want to post the endpoint for the proxy online for fear of being DDoS'ed by AI shit. But I will post the GitHub repo in case you want to fork it and get it running in your own cloudflare account (no domain needed, cloud flare will give you a URL you can access for your worker). Also, if you DM me here, I will send you the endpoint and an API key to use it. I have also attached some screenshots.
https://github.com/jeffreybergier/insecure-xml-proxy/blob/main/src/proxy.js
Also, I am not a javascript or node developer so please do not judge my code too harshly. But I am open to constructive criticism. So if you know I made a major mistake, please let me know and I will try to improve.
In the screenshots, These are all in Safari in 10.2 Jaguar. You can see in Proxy1.png that normally when you load daringfireball.net, you get the TLS failure error. Then Proxy2.png shows the small UI I have for my proxy to generate a URL to proxy Daring Fireball. Then Proxy3.png shows Daring Fireball loading in Safari via the proxy. Note that, loading heavy websites like MacRumors and TheVerge through the proxy works on my modern device but in this old version of Safari, they loaded after like 60 seconds of beachball and almost none of the CSS is understood... so your mileage will vary (a lot ;) )
And here are screenshots of NetNewsWire subscribing to RSS on 10.5 Leopard. You can see in the Proxy4.png that NetNewsWire cannot successfully subscribe to the verge rss feed. But then in Proxy5 and 6.png, it subscribes via the proxy.
And here is the obligatory screenshots of the proxy working in openstep
Ah, this reminds me that we used to have a thread about proxies and the woes of the TLSpocalypse...
Using Crypto Ancienne (https://github.com/classilla/cryanc)'s carl proxy, this guide (https://dressupgeekout.com/classic-macos/classilla-tls/) covers setting up inetd on NetBSD to run a service for any machine on a LAN. Of course, running an open proxy is a bit risky, so it's genuinely novel and useful if you can figure out how to set up a sign-up for obtaining keys that could be revoked in case of abuse. (Sadly some devices with no proxy capacity at all, like my semi-antique Kindle 3G, are stuck using the often-down FrogFind! (http://frogfind.com/) or a fork thereof, but I guess it's better than nothing.)
Yeah, this is why I did not spend much time on the html proxy. it's quick and dirty. But the reality is that most websites (even with JS removed) are just too heavy for old computers to use anyway. Something like frog find or the slug search that you hosted here are better because they really do a lot of work to read the contents out of the page and only send that.
But like I said, I want the RSS part to work, and that necessitated creating a basic html proxy as well because the rss feeds contain html.