devongovett/reader

What is this?

Google reader is shutting down. A lot of people use it. A lot of apps depend on its API. This project will be an attempt to create an API compatible replacement so those apps will continue to work by simply changing the API end point. I have no plans to build a frontend UI replacement, just the backend API. Once we have the Google Reader API working, we may be able to add extensions to it so that apps can add additional features that weren't previously possible.

Want to help?

Get in touch on Twitter or IRC (#reader on Freenode) and let me know! :) Feel free to fork this repository and send pull requests implementing features. Once you've sent a couple good ones, I'll add you as a contributor to the project to commit directly.

Things to work on:

• API endpoints - almost complete, only a few remaining unimplemented APIs and a few TODOs in the code. See a list of what's done and what needs work here.
• Testing - we could always use more of it
• Feed fetching and storing - this is the major project to work on. It somewhat kind of works at this point, and it needs to be rock solid and battle tested with lots of real world feeds and situations, some of which are listed here. The bug for discussion is here.
• etc. We are young! See the issues page for more info.

Check out the issues for more details. If you're working on something, please mark it so we don't duplicate effort.

Design Documentation

If you're interested in contributing and don't quite know where to begin, you should read the design documentation on the wiki which explains the overall architecture of the project. If you think something is missing from that page, don't hesitate to file an issue or hop in the #reader IRC channel on Freenode to ask questions!

Tech

• Node.js
• MongoDB (so I can try something new!)
• Express
• Mongoose

Some interesting modules to investigate:

• https://github.com/danmactough/node-feedparser
• https://github.com/dylang/node-rss

Some unofficial API documentation on the old Google Reader API that we'd be copying

• http://undoc.in
• http://ranchero.com/downloads/GoogleReaderAPI-2009.pdf
• http://code.google.com/p/pyrfeed/wiki/GoogleReaderAPI
• http://code.google.com/p/google-reader-api/w/list
• https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps
• https://github.com/alexch/sharebro/blob/master/notes/google-reader-api.txt

Some documentation on the dirtier side of RSS/Atom feeds: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cvq67iQpk2C7ufOsefsfKnGCXeUIv46NQHbnHkm8PtU/edit?usp=sharing

A mailing list discussing the future of RSS syncing: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/rss-sync-ranchero.com

Installation

1. Install MongoDB if you haven't already.
2. Install Node.js if you haven't already.
3. Install Redis if you haven't already.
4. Clone this repo using Git
5. Run npm install to install the dependencies

Run the API server with:

npm start

Or run the tests with:

npm test

License

MIT