Responsive RSS Feed Reader With React, Tailwind CSS & Express

What are you most proud of, and what would you do differently next time?

Building Frontpage was an opportunity to design and develop a complete product rather than simply implementing a user interface. The project evolved from a basic RSS reader into a full application with authentication, persistent user data, a custom RSS parsing backend, and a responsive reading experience.

Rendering third-party HTML safely was another area that required careful consideration. Articles are sanitized with DOMPurify before being rendered, and additional handling was implemented for missing images, malformed feeds, loading states, and network failures. These edge cases helped make the application more resilient when working with content from many different publishers.

If I continued developing Frontpage, I would focus on expanding personalization through AI-generated daily summaries, smarter feed recommendations, advanced filtering, offline reading, keyboard shortcuts, and additional reader customization options. The current architecture was intentionally designed to support these kinds of future enhancements without requiring significant restructuring.

This project strengthened my understanding of application architecture, backend integration, state management, and building maintainable React applications that consume inconsistent external data sources.

What challenges did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges was working with RSS and Atom feeds. Every publisher structures their feeds differently, with varying metadata, image formats, and content fields. Creating a normalization layer in the Express backend made the frontend significantly simpler, as it could consume a consistent article structure regardless of the source feed.

As the project grew, I invested time in refactoring instead of continuing to add features on top of existing code. Large components were split into smaller, reusable pieces, business logic moved into dedicated services and custom hooks, and repeated code was consolidated. Although these refactors required additional effort, they made the codebase easier to maintain and extend.

Another important design decision was focusing on the user experience before authentication. Demo Mode allows visitors to explore the application immediately without creating an account, while Discover and Daily Digest help users find interesting content from the start. Once authenticated, users transition seamlessly to their own subscriptions and personalized reading experience.

What specific areas of your project would you like help with?

While the core experience is complete, there are several ideas I intentionally left for future iterations.

• AI-generated article summaries and daily briefings
• Personalized feed recommendations based on reading habits
• Offline reading and article caching -Advanced search filters (author, category, date, feed)
• OPML export for migrating subscriptions
• Reader customization (font size, line height, content width, themes)
• Keyboard shortcuts for navigation
• Reading statistics and activity insights
• Feed health monitoring and automatic invalid feed detection
• Push notifications for newly published articles

Most of these features were deferred to keep the project focused on delivering a polished and reliable RSS reading experience rather than maximizing feature count.