nuthatch

Nuthatch Feedspeeder

This is a minimal/hobby feedreader, inspired by fraidycat. But a bit more manual.

First, user subscriptions are parsed from user configuration files. The feeds are fetched just once as a batch, and compiled into a static browseable report, which is served to localhost:8080.

Building

You will need a standard Go installation.

From the repo directory, go mod tidy should fetch the dependencies, and go build . should build the main executable, while go install . should build and install the main executable alongside your Go installation.

If the OPML converter is needed, descend to the nutconvert directory and build it.

Setup: user subscriptions

In order to use nuthatch as a feed reader, we first need to setup our subscriptions.

Here we break with tradition, and ditch OMPL files for simple config files. In doing this, we elide the need for a GUI to manage user subscriptions. This should be manageable, at least for a certain type of user.

Nonetheless, I try to provide a simple converter nutconvert for your current OPML files, described below.

User subscriptions are organized as flat containers called categories, with a config file for each.

Nuthatch will search for config files in a feeds subdirectory in two locations, either the current directory or in a platform-dependent user configuration directory. The latter is reported by the program when it is run.

Files can be either simple text files with a txt extention, with a feed URL on each line:

https://www.site1.com/feed.xml
https://www.site2.com/atom.rss

in which case, the category be named after the base filename,

or toml files with a toml extension:

name = "My Category"

[[feeds]]
name = "Mr. Muster's Mysteries"
link = "https://muster.com/feed.xml"

[[feeds]]
name = "Site 2"
link = "https://www.site2.com/atom.rss"

# more feeds below

where an optional name variable can rename the category. Each feed block should have a link property and can optionally be renamed with name.

Converting an OPML file to toml

To attempt to convert an OPML file, run nutconvert [file.opml]. If successful, this will output converted feeds in an opml_convert subdirectory.

This will only regard the title, link, and category channel properties. It assumes that category may be a comma separated list of tags, and tries to collect these in separate category files.

If this works, you can copy these to a feeds directory to use, and possibly edit later to refine them.

Using

To use, simply run the main nuthatch executable. It should parse your subscriptions, fetch the feeds, and open up a browser to localhost:8080.

Categories are displayed as tabs and each feed is a details element that can be expanded.

Once the page is loaded, the program can be closed immediately.

Logo attribution

The "nuthatch logo" is a derivative of "Kleiber Sitta europaea-0447.jpg" by Isiwal, used under CC BY-SA. "nuthatch logo" is licensed under CC BY-SA by ravelite.