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🦉 Bubo Reader

Bubo Reader is a hyper-minimalist feed reader (RSS, Atom, JSON) you can deploy on your own server, 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 this project on my blog:

Get Started

That's it! You should now have a static page with links to the latest content from your feeds in the public folder, ready to serve.

<details> <summary> <strong>Anatomy of Bubo Reader</strong> </summary>

The static pieces:

The engine:

</details> <details> <summary> <strong>Throttling</strong> </summary>

In the main index.ts file you will find two values that allow you to batch and throttle your feed requests:

The default configuration is no batching or throttling because 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:

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:

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.

</details> <details> <summary> <strong>Getting Started</strong> </summary>

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Deploying to Glitch

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

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.

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Deploying to Netlify

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!

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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:

Rolling Your Own

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

</details>

Demos

You can view live demos here:

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:

Please share if you would like to be featured!