smoke-signal

A simple web-based RSS reader.

Try the demo, with username userusernamename and password wordpass.

Setup

smoke-signal requires sqlite, Python 3, lxml and the JavaScript libraries listed in package.json under "dependencies". Install the Python dependencies with pip install -r requirements.txt. If you have npm, you can install the JavaScript dependencies with npm install.

Create a configuration file in instance/config.py; the file config.py in the root directory can serve as a starting point. Note that you have to fill in a username and password, which will be used as your login credentials, as well as a secret key which will be used for CSRF protection.

You can run python -m utils.opml_import script on an OPML file to import a list of feeds.

Finally, run webpack -p to bundle the JavaScript code and python run.py to run the server.

Key shortcuts

Use j and k to scroll down/up entries, m to toggle an entry as read, g m to mark all entries as read, r to refresh the feed, and g r to refresh all feeds. (Warning: the last one is pretty slow at the moment.)

Tests

Tests can be run with python -m unittest discover -t . -s tests -v.

Issues

There are many features to be added, such as search, and being able to add a feed by handing the home page's URL to the server and making it look for the feed. These features are likely not hard to implement, but for now I'm focusing on fixing eventual bugs in the existing features.

In particular, the JavaScript code could use more tests. It could also give the user better feedback when something wrong (which I expect to usually be a network-related problem) happens.

Later, I want to add some extensibility: the ability to add your own script to fetch a feed, à la Liferea. Surprisingly, there are still websites that don't have an RSS feed in 2016. Also, there's a lot of room for improvement in styling; Bootstrap has been of great help there and it's probably not hard to build it up from it.

Although at the moment the Python code (under server/) and the JavaScript code (under js/) are in the same project, the two are completely decoupled, other than Flask serves some HTML. I'm likely to split the code into different projects in the future, which will make a possible migration to Node easier.