Journalist

journalist is a lightweight daemon and CLI written in Go, focused on simplicity and integrability. As usually, I chose GO because it’s simply the quickest way to put things like these together, and it gives a statically-linked, single a.out in the end.

journalist initially used BuntDB as a storage engine, just like zeit does, but I ended up replacing it with PostgresSQL. I intended to be able to run journalist as an ephemeral service, hence an embedded database isn’t a very good choice. Also, it made sense to use a relational database considering the way the Fever API is structured.

Currently, journalist implements the very basics that allows connecting a Fever API client (like Reeder) to access subscriptions and read articled. There is no way to actually manage subscriptions over the API (yet), but it’s possible to use the subscribe command on the CLI to subscribe to new feeds.

As soon as I have all these basic features in place, I’ll be looking into teaching journalist a few nifty tricks like crawling article’s web content in order to display not only summaries but full stories for sites that usually only show an excerpt of their content through RSS. I’ll also experiment with injecting additional information, like links to relevant content from different sources.

journalist will be available as pre-built binaries for macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Plan9.