bottle-fever

A clean-room clone of the Fever RSS aggregator, focusing on providing a compatible API and a simple but scalable feed store and fetcher based on SQLite or Postgres (using the Peewee ORM)

Project Status (May 2014)

This is ON HOLD -- i.e., usable and reasonably updated, but I have decided I'd rather read my RSS feeds as mail and moved on to use rss2imap, which was a more cost-effective hack.

I am preparing to incorporate portions of this into rss2imap-gae, which is a completely different thing in more ways than one, so look there for news.

Nevertheless, this codebase has served me well in terms of exploring ways to parallelize feed fetching -- I suggest you explore the available branches to get a feel for the different strategies I employed.

Target Features

• Multi-user support
• Compatible with Reeder apps on iOS and Mac OS X
• URL expansion (i.e., no more junk URLs)
• Grouping of similar items
• Junk filtering (automatic elimination of redundant news items)
• Page extraction from link-only feeds

Stuff I don't intend to do

• A full-featured web interface (feel free to add your own)

Related Work

• Coldsweat, by Andrea Peltrin, is a much nicer, polished solution if you're looking for something like this. And yes, there's a nice web interface in there, too.

Technical underpinnings

• SQLite database (trivial to replace if you want to scale up, since I use the Peewee ORM)
• Bottle web framework
• gevent for parallel feed fetching
• Uses Mark Pilgrim's feedparser as a fallback to HiiDef's speedparser
• Pick your own HTML parser (lxml, html5lib, html.parser)
• A nice bowl of BeautifulSoup