I get really frustrated trying to read websites on my phone. I used to use Google Reader, but that died so I switched to Feedly. But I became frustrated with the ads, including some particularly invasive ones. So I just started cycling through sites, one bookmark at a time.
Even ignoring the extra work it takes to move from site to site, it's still not much better. Websites are full of ads too, and increasingly they seem to be videos or animated images. I just want to see a list of the article names, and maybe an excerpt of the article, so I can decide whether to skip it, read it, or save it for later. I don't need to download all those bytes.
So I thought about making my own (yet another) feed reader. What's different about this one? It runs on the command-line.
SporkFeed is a command-line rss/atom feed reader. It loads articles from multiple websites and lets you read them in plain text. Here are some of the features:
- No central website or server - the feed data is under your control
- You choose where to put the reader state (e.g. put it in DropBox so you can read from multiple devices)
- Simple keyboard command interface
- Launch articles in a web browser (where possible)
- Open Source (github)
- Cross-platform
The core of the reader is in a separate module, sporkfeed-core, so in theory multiple user interfaces ca n be written against the same reader state. That would mean that the feed data could be shared between the command-line interface and a mobile interface. I'm thinking of making either a web interface or a mobile app, which would finally solve my phone reader problem.
This command-line version requires node.js. Once you have that, just run this to install it:
npm install -g sporkfeed
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