🦉 Bubo Reader

Bubo Reader is a hyper-minimalist RSS and JSON feed reader you can deploy on Netlify in a few steps or Glitch 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.

It is named after this silly robot owl from Clash of the Titans (1981).

You can read more about how this project came about in my blog post 'Introducing Bubo RSS: An Absurdly Minimalist RSS Feed Reader'

Anatomy of Bubo Reader

• src/index.html - a Nunjucks template that lets you change how the feeds are displayed
• output/style.css - a CSS file to stylize your feed output
• 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

Demos

You can view live demos here:

• https://bubo-rss-demo.netlify.com/
• http://bubo-rss.glitch.me/

Not the most exciting-looking demos, I'll admit, but they work!

Getting Started

• Deploying to Glitch
• Deploying to Netlify
• Keeping feeds updated

Deploying to Glitch

The quickest way is to remix the project on Glitch: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/bubo-rss

Just changed some feeds in ./src/feeds.json file and you're set! If you'd like to modify the style or the template you can changed ./output/style.css file or the ./src/template.html file respectively.

There is also a special glitch branch you can clone if you prefer: https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss/tree/glitch

The only difference between this branch and master is that it spins up a server using Express to serve your ./output/index.html file on Glitch. Everything else is the same.

Deploying to Netlify

• Fork the repository
• From your forked repository go to and edit src/feeds.json to manage your feeds and categories
• Create a new site on Netlify from GitHub

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!

Keeping Feeds Updated

Using Netlify Webhooks

To keep your feeds up to date you'll want to setup a Build Hook for your Netlify site and use another service to ping it every so often to trigger a rebuild. I'd suggest looking into:

• IFTTT
• Zapier
• EasyCron

If you already have a server running Linux and some command-line experience it might be simpler to setup a cron job.

Using GitHub Actions

This approach is a little different and requires some modifications to the repository. Netlify started billing for build minutes very shortly after I published this project. Running npm build and downloading all of the RSS feeds took up a substantial number of these, particulary if you had a process pinging the webhook and triggering a build every 15 minutes or so.

How is the The GitHub Action-based approach different? The same build process runs, but this time it's on GitHub's servers via the Action. It then commits the newly created file generated at ./output/index.html back into the repository. Netlify still gets pinged when the repository is updated, but skips the npm run build step on their end. This significantly reduces the number of build minutes required.

TLDR: use the github-action-publishing branch for now if you'd prefer to use GitHub Actions.

Note: The GitHub Action is setup to build and commit directly to the master branch, which is not the best practice. I'd suggest creating a separate branch to checkout and commit changes to in the action. You could then specify that same branch as the one to checkout and publish on Netlify.

Support

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, Digital Ocean or Vultr.

Showcase

Here are some websites using Bubo Reader:

• Kevin Fiol (repo)