Fun fact: fetching favicons from various domains is a dark art. Might seem trivial at first, but it’s very complicated. A simple request for a favicon.ico will net strange returns — like serving a text file as a favicon.ico.

Better to leverage a browser which excels at interpreting favicons or contact a CDN of a major search engine. Make sure to cache the results.

• https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip1/en.wikipedia.org.ico
• https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=en.wikipedia.org

The GUID is an interesting element in the RSS specification — yeah another post about RSS. You could hash the content of a post and commit to the idea that it shouldn’t change.

If a post changes, then the GUID would provide a trail of edits, with the drawback of possibly resurfacing an old post. This article from 15 years ago explores what feed readers did at the time when given a link and/or guid.

I’m not a podcast person, but this podcast index is rather handy. It appears that they’re gathering the disparate podcast namespaces into a collective RSS namespace — there’s even a podcast feed generator. Might be useful if you’re into podcasting.

Perhaps the only benefit of being behind a CGNAT on an increasingly centralizing Internet is conserving time. Playing the “are you human” captcha game is an excellent incentive for minimal browsing and off-lining as much software as possible.