Fresh News

Live at: xkahn.com

I missed the old Popurls site -- Popurls -- and don't like the replacement Upstract

Ben Donnelly did some of the hard work of replicating the Popurls site at http://feedcourt.bendonnelly.com/. He published his code on Github.

I took his initial code and made a number of modifications:

UI:

• Make fonts bigger for desktop
• Alter the MORE buttons to work even if the page is still loading
• Add an image preview for news items, if available
• Add secondary content on items (comments typically) if available
• Add a tooltip on hover with any additional details
• Add a "freshness" score for the feed to highlight broken feeds

Backend

• Split generation into 3 steps: feed loading, feed caching, and page construction

Feed loading

• Add non-RSS support for Buzzfeed after their RSS feeds stopped updating 1/23/2024
• Add non-RSS support for Digg after their RSS feeds went away some time in the distant past
• Add support for "unstable" RSS feeds that tend to go down often by silently allowing their failures
• For more stable RSS feeds, yell loudly when there is a problem
• Add a verbose option to feed loading to aid debugging when things go wrong

Feed caching

• Store the last known good load of followed feeds
• Cache is currently kept off the web server, but this could be used to update feeds on the page using the local feed store

Page construction

• Support the UI changes above
• Add special support for reddit feeds to display:
  • Author of the post
  • subreddit of the post
  • Display links to old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com
  • Add support for Reddit images and videos

Requires

Python feedparser