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# 🦉 Bubo Reader
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).
Bubo is a somewhat irrationally minimalist <acronym title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</acronym> and <acronym title="JavaScript Object Notation">JSON</acronym> feed reader you can deploy on [Netlify](https://netlify.com) in a few 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.
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:
It is named after this [silly robot owl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYSeCfo9-NI) from Clash of the Titans (1981).
- Had an absurdly simple interface that relied almost entirely on default HTML element behaviors and functionality
- Could be themed with CSS or mildly extended using JavaScript, if I wanted (but I decided not to)
- 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.
- Didn't rely on a database to see what I've read or keep an archive of content over time.
You can read more about how this project came about in my blog post '[Introducing Bubo RSS: An Absurdly Minimalist RSS Feed Reader](https://george.mand.is/2019/11/introducing-bubo-rss-an-absurdly-minimalist-rss-feed-reader/)'
## What does "irrationally minimalist" mean?
## Getting Started
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.
How to use Bubo Reader in a few easy steps with GitHub and Netlify:
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.
### Deploying from GitHub to Netlify
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.
- [Fork the repository](https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss/fork)
- From your forked repository go to and edcit `src/feeds.json` to manage your feeds and categories
- [Create a new site](https://app.netlify.com/start) on Netlify from GitHub
## What about authentication?
The deploy settings should automatically import from the `netlify.toml` file. All you'll need to do is confirm and you're ready to go!
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.
### Keeping Feeds Updated
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 suggeste looking into:
- [IFTTT](https://ifttt.com/)
- [Zapier](https://zapier.com/)
- [EasyCron](https://www.easycron.com/)
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).
## Anatomy of Bubo Reader
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- `src/feeds.json` - a JSON file containing the URLs for various site's feeds separated into categories
- `src/index.js` - the script that loads the feeds and does the actual parsinga and rendering
## Adding Feeds
## Support
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.
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.
## Updating
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.
## How to use
- Clone this repository
- Find RSS feeds and add them to `src/feeds.json`
- Go to Netlify and deploy site from GitHub.
- That's it!
You'll probably want it to update regularly though.
### Instructiosn for IFTTT
### Instructions for Zapier
### Instructions for EasyCron
### Instructions for cronjob (local or otherwise)
## Sponsor
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).
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 affiliate links to setup a micro instance on [Linode](https://www.linode.com/?r=8729957ab02b50a695dcea12a5ca55570979d8b9) or [Digital Ocean](https://m.do.co/c/31f58d367777).