forked from notBrad/bubo-rss
52 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
# 🦉 Bubo Reader
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Bubo is a somewhat irrationally minimalist <acronym title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</acronym> feed reader you can deploy on Netlify in a few simple steps. It is named after this [silly robot owl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSeCfo9-NI) from Clash of the Titans (1981).
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I created this one weekend after nostalgically lamenting the [demise of Google Reader](https://killedbygoogle.com/) many years ago. Many RSS feed reader services have sprouted up since then but they all do more than I need. I wanted something that:
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- Had an absurdly simple interface that relied almost entirely on default HTML element behaviors and functionality
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- Could be themed with CSS or mildly extended using JavaScript, if I wanted (but I decided not to)
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- Didn't worry about pulling in the feed content into the reader's interface. I'm happy to read most content on the site it originated from. I just wanted a single dashboard to see when new stuff is published and available.
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- Didn't rely on a database to see what I've read or keep an archive of content over time.
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## What does "irrationally minimalist" mean?
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Many RSS readers—including the former Google Reader—would pull the contents of a post into your feed so you could read everything in one place. Although I completely understand why someone would want to do that, I decided even that introduced too much complexity for my liking.
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My goal with Bubo was to be able to see a list of the most recent posts from websites I like in one place with links to read them if I want. That's it. If I want to read something, I'll click through and read it on the publisher's site. If I want to keep track of what I've clicked on and read I can reflect that using the `a:visited` pseudo selector in my CSS.
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Bubo does not store posts in a database or keep track of what I've read. If an item is no longer available in the site's feed then it no longer appears in Bubo. If I miss something, that's just life. I can live with that.
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## What about authentication?
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There is no authenticaton required for Bubo. Netlify does offer Basic Authentication under their [Pro plan](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/), which would be an easy solution to implement. You could probably also utilize their [Identity](https://www.netlify.com/docs/identity/?_ga=2.147267447.1334380953.1567004741-1681444902.1549770801) feature to add some authentication. I don't subscribe to any private or sensitive feeds, so at the moment that isn't much of a priority for this project.
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## Anatomy of Bubo Reader
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- `src/index.html` - a [Nunjucks](https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/) template that lets you change how the feeds are displayed
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- `output/style.css` - a CSS file to stylize your feed output
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- `src/feeds.json` - a JSON file containing the URLs for various site's feeds separated into categories
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- `src/index.js` - the script that loads the feeds and does the actual parsinga and rendering
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## Adding Feeds
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Find them in the site's source code and add them to the `feeds.json` file. This is the trickiest part of this whole setup I suppose.
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The first version of this project used [Puppeteer](https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer) to extract the feeds from a site. This was actually quite cool, but would hang or fail periodicially. I was running this on its own server. It's on my list to look into converting this into a serverless version that could run using Netlify's Functions, but after using my own project for a month I realized it didn't make the thing feel much more usable to me. Builds were slow and there was a lot of work making sure things didn't timeout or use too much memory on the server. Simply parsing a list of known RSS feeds was much simpler and faster.
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## Updating
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The beauty of running Bubo on Netlify is you can [setup a Build Hook](https://www.netlify.com/docs/webhooks/#incoming-webhooks) to rebuild the site when you want to "refresh" the list of feeds. I'm using [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com) to trigger rebuilds once an hour, which is a perfectly sane rate to consume information at. You could do the same, or use another service like Zapier, EasyCron, setup a cronjob on your server or even setup a cronjob to run locally on your machine and ping the hook as often as you wish.
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## How to use
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- Clone this repository
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- Find RSS feeds and add them to `src/feeds.json`
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- Go to Netlify and deploy site from GitHub.
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- That's it!
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## Sponsor
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If you found this useful please consider sponsoring me or this project. If you'd rather run this on your own server please consider using one of these affiliates links to setup a $5 instance on [Linode](https://www.linode.com/?r=8729957ab02b50a695dcea12a5ca55570979d8b9) or [Digital Ocean](https://m.do.co/c/31f58d367777).
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