Unblock URLs from My Own Filter Lists

Podcast doesn’t fetch

I have multiple devices that are using different URL based filter methods. Some are at the router level and some are at the system level, e.g., Hosts file, DNS and VPN built-in.

Recently, I found out there is a broken one in my podcast subscriptions.

It’s been a long time not listening to the podcast, Startups For the Rest of Us, since I started following Rob Walling’s new show called MicroConf. However, I want to return for the bonus episodes on SFTROU occasionally.

But it’s broken— my podcast client couldn’t fetch the RSS feed.

The official URL is:

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/feed/podcast

However, it redirects to:

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/startupsfortherestofus&x=1

FeedBlitz is a marketing platform that seems not respectful to our privacy. This is why it gets blocked by my filter lists. Though, I have to whitelist it for the SFTROU podcast. It’s fairly easy to do for NextDNS.

Tools to Find out the IP

For other cases, I have to create an override rule with a working IP address.

If I ping feeds.feedblitz.com, it returns from localhost (127.0.0.1) because it’s been blocked by my filters.

The lazy way is turn off all filters temporarily, which I don’t want.

There are network tools from keycdn such as IP and DNS lookup, either would work. These can get the IP addresses outside from my filtered network.

Another option is a cool tool called dns-detector, which is a nodejs cli tool.

Install it by simply npm i -g dns-detector and use it with

dns --host=feeds.feedblitz.com

The result looks like:

Resolving <feeds.feedblitz.com> IP...                     
                    
+ 8.8.8.8 > **ms >>  198.71.55.253  74.208.183.175  74.208.186.160   

Then, just pick one like 198.71.55.253 to pair with feeds.feedblitz.com in the whitelist override rule. The broken SFTROU podcast would back to normal.