It's Alive!

I’ve finally pushed my RSS reader up to github.

There is a huge list of things todo.

As most RSS Readers during these times, it was born out of Google Readers death. When I started I decided this was just going to be a project that I was going to play with, and I found an alternative reader until I could finish mine. As it turned out, the reader I picked made a few horrible updates, and it forced my hand to push out something that is usable for me. I’ve been using it every day for over two months now. There are a lot of rough edges, but the daily routine of reading articles works just fine.

I’ve really come to love this project in so many ways. One way, only my own bad UI choices will be forced upon me. Another is it let’s me code, as it’s no longer one of my job duties. But the greatest part about this is that it’s just such a wonderful playground for everything. You can tinker with so many areas and still have something completely usable. You could focus in on parsing, and write your own XML parser. You could play with ORM’s like DBIx::Class, or Moose-ify your internals. Want to work on your UI skills? It’s easy to tackle some Bootstrap and jQuery. Maybe backends are more your thing. Think about how your articles will fit into NoSQL database. Use Lucene to provide a nice search. Write a daemon that predicts the most optimal times to retrieve new articles based on past history. Maybe you’ve heard about configuration management tools, and you wan to try out something like Ansible. So many facets can be explored. But it’s not just about exploring. All of these things are easy to combine in a working system that you can use every day. That’s why it’s so great.

I knew it was going to be fun. I didn’t realize how much fun it was going to be. I would encourage everyone to write a RSS reader; It’s quite an adventure.

Gratuitous screenshot: