Next: Storage

feeder ¶

feeder is a free software newsfeeds aggregator. I wrote it solely for my personal needs, so currently probably there is some hard-code in the scripts.

My experience was heavily based on Newsboat reader, that unfortunately was rewritten on Rust, so I had to use its old version. I also saw sfeed project, that tries to reuse many already existing tools (like curl), be suckless and Unix-friendly, but failed somewhere during the try, and asked myself if it is really so hard to make that kind of software. It was written in less than a day, completely replacing Newsboat, with much higher performance and great flexibility.

Its architecture is very simple:

cURL is used to download feed URLs.
Go-written feed2mdir utility parses and converts feed’s items to mail messages stored inside Maildir.
Automatically generated Mutt source file contains convenient options and human-readable mailboxes list.
GNU parallel for parallel invocation of download/parsing jobs.
mu utilities perform indexing and searching among the messages. Of course it would be trivial to use recoll or notmuch instead, if you need that.
Bunch of optional Zsh helper scripts.

But of course it has its price: original feed data, its Base64-encoded copy in mailbox and another copy in mu’s Xapian database.

• Storage:
• Mail:
• Usage: