naggie / megafilter

2013: Single-user Google RSS Reader alternative, with RESTful API
http://callanbryant.co.uk/#Blog/introducing_megafilter.md
Apache License 2.0
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DEVELOPMENT PAUSED, I HAVE EXAMS. SORRY. Graduated with a First (MEng)!

This is a personal replacement for Google reader. It's simple and suits my workflow.

Articles are added to a circular FIFO queue, so that the latest articles always appear next. Articles can be:

Destructive actions can be undone (u).

The current article is synchronised across all devices, so you can continue reading on yor smartphone.

It's quite a nice use for your Raspberry Pi.

State: Very beta but working very well! I have migrated from Google reader to Megafilter. Patches welcome! to produce a starred items feed. My copy publishes to http://callanbryant.co.uk/#Recommended

screenshot

See my blog post about it.

sudo npm install -g megafilter
# copy subscriptions.xml and starred.json from your google reader takeout to here
megafilter -s subscriptions.xml --import-greader-starred starred.json
open http://localhost:8080

The idea is that you run this on your own server. You can specify a PORT via the environment variable or --port. Setcap can be used to run from port 80 without sudo; this is documented at the end of this file.

There will be a subscriptions manager soon. For the mean time, always start the server with -s subscriptions.xml. Note that you only need to import once!

You can specify --password <password> to require auth. A --username can be set, but this defaults to the executing user.

By default megafilter will save the published items to ~/megafilter-published.json. You can change this directory with --store-dir

When megafilter starts, it will check each feed within the first 2 minutes (this is so that servers don't get hammered) and after this, each feed will be checked at the average post interval. Articles that are posted after the initial check are added to the queue, so it may take a while for articles to appear. If you are excited and/or impatient like me, then you may use the new --backfill 5 option, to initially add articles that were new in the last 5 hours. Articles will take 2 minutes to appear.

RESTful JSON API

GET /next Get the next article. Returns article and pending count.

GET /current Get the current article (good for first load) returns article and pending count.

DELETE /queue/:id Discard an article from the queue.

PUT /publish/:id Publish an article by ID from the queue.

GET /published Given a count as parameter, return published articles. 0 Means all articles, unspecified means 50.

GET /pending Gives the current number of articles pending

DELETE /published/:id Delete an article from the published collection

POST /enqueue Remotely adds an article to the queue.

Article format

The same as the node-feedparser format.

Published articles

Currently, megafilter does not create a published RSS feed. If that's needed by someone I'll add it. The reason I did not put it is because RSS is not cross-domain, and is annoying to parse with jQuery.

The /published JSONP feed is simply the latest 50 published articles in the format that node-feedparser produces.

If you want an example on how to integrate the published items, see my website engine.

I'll probably make this available as part of megafilter.

Running without sudo on port 80

If you want to host on port 80 under ubuntu on your account, you can install libcap2-bin then run setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/local/bin/node to give node access to port 80.

Your path to the node binary may vary, you can find it with which node

Theming

Since v0.5.1 (global) theming is supported! To use theming, add:

--theme <name>

To the megafilter command, where <name> is the filename of a css file in public/themes/. Currently, the two themes available are default and lime. Many thanks to @dvbportal for developing the lime theme.

Here is the lime theme, which is responsive so that it adjusts to your device:

screenshot

If you are switching themes, you may need to do a refresh to clear the cache. It is CTRL+SHIFT+R on Chrome.

Acknowledgements

Megafilter would not have been possible without the following awesome projects:

Donate on gittip to support megafilter, if you like. Thanks!