Bubo Reader is a hyper-minimalist <acronymtitle="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</acronym> and <acronymtitle="JavaScript Object Notation">JSON</acronym> feed reader you can deploy on your own server, [Netlify](https://netlify.com) in a few steps or [Glitch](https://glitch.com) in even fewer steps! The goal of the project is to generate a webpage that shows a list of links from a collection of feeds organized by category and website. That's it.
Version 2.0 has introduced some substantial changes for Bubo! While the static output remains endearingly spartan, the engine that builds it has changed a bit.
Hopefully all of these changes are in services of making this project more useful to others and encouraging outside contributions.
Changes of note:
- Bubo has been rewritten in [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/). It's pretty slick! I anticipate the typing could be improved, but it's a start.
- The script will actually write your `index.html` file for you (Previously the build script simply ran `node src/index.js > output/index.html`). It makes a strong assumption that this file lives in the `public` folder.
- There is a somewhat sophisticated mechansim in-place for batching & throttling your requests, if needed.
-`conf/feeds.json` - a JSON file containing your feed URLS separated into categories.
-`config/template.html` - a [Nunjucks](https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/) template that lets you change how the feeds are displayed. This can be changed to anything else you like— see below.
-`public/style.css` - a CSS file to stylize your feed output.
-`public/index.html` - The HTML file that gets automatically generated when Bubo is run.
The engine:
-`src/index.ts` - The primary script you run when you want to build a new version of Bubo. It will automatically fetch the latest content from your feeds and build a new static file at `public/index.html`.
-`src/renderer.ts` — The renderer that loads Nunjucks, the template and understands how to process the incoming feed data. Prefer something else? This is the place to change it!
-`src/utilities.ts` — A variety of parsing and normalization utilities for Bubo, hidden away to try and keep things clean.
The default configuration is **no batching or throttling** beacuse `MAX_CONNECTIONS` is set to `Infinity`. If you wanted to change Bubo to only fetch one feed at a time every second you could set these values to:
```javascript
const MAX_CONNECTIONS = 1;
const DELAY_MS = 1000;
```
If you wanted to limit things to 10 simultaneous requests every 2.5 seconds you could set it like so:
```javascript
const MAX_CONNECTIONS = 10;
const DELAY_MS = 2500;
```
In practice, I've never _really_ run into an issue leaving `MAX_CONNECTIONS` set to `Infinity` but this feels like a sensible safeguard to design.
There is also a `glitch` branch on this repo if you'd prefer to start there.
Just change some feeds in `./config/feeds.json` file and you're set! If you'd like to modify the style or the template you can changed `./public/style.css` file or the `./config/template.html` file respectively.
To keep your feeds up to date you'll want to [setup a Build Hook](https://www.netlify.com/docs/webhooks/#incoming-webhooks) for your Netlify site and use another service to ping it every so often to trigger a rebuild. I'd suggest looking into:
If you already have a server running Linux and some command-line experience it might be simpler to setup a [cron job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron).
If you'd rather run this on your own server please consider using one of these affiliate links to setup a micro instance on [Linode](https://www.linode.com/?r=8729957ab02b50a695dcea12a5ca55570979d8b9), [Digital Ocean](https://m.do.co/c/31f58d367777) or [Vultr](https://www.vultr.com/?ref=8403978).
