Introduction#

Something I’m a big fan of is RSS. With social media apps like Twitter being run by megalomaniacs and pushing the stupidest people (or bots) you’ll ever see, it’s quite relaxing to have a feed of stuff you curate, is only chronological, and isn’t going to spit in your face with dumb opinions. One big thing I use RSS feeds for is getting updates for games. For example, I have an RSS feed which pulls the latest Twitter posts from Zenless Zone Zero’s official account, which is useful to see when I’m scrolling through my RSS feed and don’t need to open Twitter just for that.

One game which I do want to be updated on is Hytale, which recently launched in early access, and I’ve had a lot of fun (although I haven’t got much time) exploring out the new dungeons and environments. At a first glance, it wouldn’t feel much different than Minecraft, but playing it for a bit really shows how different the two games are, and honestly? I like both, but for now I am giving the edge to Minecraft. Since the game’s early access, the team’s been putting out a lot of blog posts detailing their changes, and since I’m quite forgetful, I used rss-bridge’s feed to keep myself updated.

What’s rss-bridge?#

This is honestly a really cool project, and if you’re interested in making an RSS feed, I really do recommend checking out their GitHub repo and public instance for more info.

What it does is scrape or use API data from hundreds of websites that don’t offer traditional RSS feeds, and provide a clean link you can punch into any RSS reader to get updates from that websites. Considering how so many websites want you to stay on their site for ad revenue and retention, it’s a good way to get your info without needing to make accounts or subscribe to something. Hytale is one of those websites which had a feed, and for a while it worked just fine. Now, where was the issue?

The Hytale Feed#

Hytale’s feed used to be pretty simple. If you look back at the commit history, you can see that they exposed a direct URL to fetch every post, so making an RSS feed was little more than getting posts from that slug URL and formatting it to fit rss-bridge’s requirements for collecting posts. However, this changed around February or March 2026, where Hytale switched their CMS, making that old link invalid.

Now, navigating to that link brings you to a 404.

Since I liked the feed, I decided to take it upon myself to fix the bridge and get it working again.

Digging into the Website#

Since the api link was now invalid, my best bet was now to scrape the site and get the blog posts from there. Thankfully, the stars aligned, and scraping the site wasn’t impossible. For now, the site doesn’t have extreme anti-bot measures, and considering Hytale is still a niche game, I don’t think this bridge being fixed would increase server load on them, which I’d hate to do. Looking at the blog’s DOM, I could see that all blog posts were inside one div with a persistent id, and that each blog post was an article element, which makes it easy to loop through in PHP.

Looking into a specific article, what stuck out to me is how clean everything was formatted. Yes, the div names were a bit nonsensical, but I’m chalking that up to whatever CMS or build system automatically generating names rather than deliberate obfsucation, as is the case with almost any production website you see. Since the div names were the same for every single article (probably for CSS and JS rules), I could just add them as global variables to the new bridge, and just scan for those and construct blog posts through that. Here’s a list of every element and what they correspond to with the blog post you’ll see in a compiled RSS or Atom feed:

• [div] space-y-0: Container for every blog post, think of it as the actual RSS feed
• [article]: Containers for individual blog posts by Hytale, also displays quick info
• [article.a.href]: The link to the full blog post, what your RSS reader will link to
• [article.a.span.h4]: The title of the blog post
• [article.a.span.span.line-clamp-4]: The description of the blog post. This is cut off, since it’s meant to give a preview of the whole post
• [article.a.img.src]: The link to the preview image used for the blog post. This is what your RSS reader should show as the OG image
• [article.a.span.span.flex.flex-row.gap-2 span] Contains both the date published and the author.

Once that was all figured out, all it really took was about 30 minutes within PhpStorm to rewrite the bridge so that it could properly scrape. Here’s a link to the updated bridge, which is fully working. After a bit of linting to fit the coding style policy, my PR was ready to be merged.

TIP

Make sure to follow the coding style guidelines of any open source project you’re contributing to, there’s a reason the maintainers have those rules, and it just makes everyone’s lives easier.

Thanks to me, now the Hytale bridge is up and running again.

Conclusion#

This was actually my first time working with a full project in PHP. While I’ve tinkered around with it before, this was a good first step into the language, and it’s given me a bit of insight on future projects I want to do. One thing I do want to tackle in the future with rss-bridge is getting past anti-bot measures, since many sites don’t take kindly to rss-bridge and their many instances. For now, I’m happy with the changes I’ve done.