Stick to local stuff, no need to open ports at all. I got myself a Raspberry Pi and I just have it next to my router.

Once I felt like using it outside my network, instead of opening ports and doing complicated stuff that didn’t work cuz I am behind a Nat, I just used Tailscale instead, it’s a private VPN that is free for a limited amount of devices (like 10 or more I think so it’s fine for you and family). It’s the best easiest thing ever

FreshRSS is what I use and I can create my own feeds using X path, it’s kinda great but too much to explain. I wrote a blog about it.

https://joelchrono12.xyz/blog/newsboat-queries-and-freshrss-scraping/

yeah but I kinda dislike cloudflare. Tailscale is based on wireguard which is cool

Check out tailscale, the best tool ever to access a server without opening ports or doing hard stuff

Hmm. AntennaPod supports syncing with Next loud via a Gpodder’s API, if each kid gets its own next loud account it should work fine

Well you can install it locally and get the web interface via localhost, but if it’s a proper server you can access the news from your sources from anywhere and you can also use 3rd party apps in your phone to get a different interface via the API

FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don’t provide one