reader

A Google Reader clone for the agent era — an RSS, Atom, JSON Feed and podcast reader that runs as an Electron desktop app or a hosted web service from one shared TypeScript codebase.

📚 Docs: dev.standardbeagle.com/reader — quick start, user guide, API reference, hosting, configuration, and changelog. 🎯 Demo: dev.standardbeagle.com/reader/demo — the full app on bundled content, no install.

The Features page has the same tour as video with narration.

RSS was always pull-based updates from publishers. Agents are exactly the kind of prolific, structured publishers that drown a chat UI but fit a feed perfectly. This reader treats feeds as the universal subscription format — blogs today, agent digests tomorrow.

Features

• Feed reading — RSS, Atom, JSON Feed and IndieWeb h-feed pages; conditional GET, adaptive refresh intervals that honor the publisher's ttl, Cache-Control and Retry-After, exponential backoff on failures, and history backfill for feeds that page it (RFC 5005, JSON Feed next_url)
• Private feeds — username/password, access token, or OAuth 2.0 (PKCE) sign-in, each bound to the feed's own host
• Imports — OPML from any other reader, or YouTube subscriptions from a Google Takeout export
• Podcasts — in-reader player with Podcasting 2.0 chapters and transcripts; new episodes arrive as soon as Podping announces them
• Classic three-pane UI — feeds · article list · article view, with a mobile layout, swipe navigation, and installable PWA support
• Pinboard view — image-led card grid for the article list
• Unread-only navigation — edge dots mark unread neighbors; a header toggle restricts prev/next (buttons, swipe, j/k) to unread articles
• Read state — mark read on click, mark-all-read, per-feed unread counts
• Snooze — hide an article until later (later today / tomorrow / next week); it stays unread and resurfaces when the snooze expires
• Saved lists — permanent collections of articles, public or private; every public list is itself an RSS feed at /lists/<token>.xml
• Ingestors — Mastodon (hashtags or your home timeline), Bluesky, and Reddit as feeds, or several feeds merged into one AI-filtered, summarized view; digest modes and LLM keep/drop threshold
• Connected accounts — Mastodon and Reddit sign in through OAuth; no passwords stored
• Real-time — Mastodon streaming and Bluesky Jetstream deliver posts as they are published, over outbound connections only
• Keyboard shortcuts — j/k browse, snooze from the keyboard, bind keys to saved lists
• XSS-safe rendering — every article body sanitized server-side with DOMPurify
• Local-first — embedded SQLite, no account needed; the hosted mode shares the same codebase
• Loopback-only by default — binds 127.0.0.1; exposure is a deliberate opt-in

Roadmap

Milestone	Status	Contents
M1	✅ done	parser, sanitizer, storage, poller, API, minimal UI, Electron shell
M2	🔶 partial	keyboard nav (j/k shipped), snooze, saved lists; folders, starring, mark-read-on-scroll planned
M3	planned	full-text search, per-feed full-text extraction (Readability)
M4	🔶 partial	OPML import shipped, hosted deployment live; multi-user (auth, Postgres) planned
M5	planned	Google Reader API compat, offline web (service worker)

Shipped since the roadmap was written: snooze, saved lists with public RSS feeds, ingestors (Mastodon / Bluesky / Reddit / combined AI view), OPML and YouTube imports, pinboard view, unread-only navigation, the hosted deployment behind Cloudflare Access, JSON Feed and h-feed, private-feed sign-in and OAuth connected accounts, podcasts with chapters and transcripts, history backfill, and real-time delivery (Podping, Mastodon streaming, Bluesky Jetstream).

Future direction: agents as publishers — an agent that can write an Atom file to a URL is already subscribable; a future milestone makes that first-class (watched directory / publish endpoint).

Quickstart

Requires Node 22+ and pnpm.

pnpm install
pnpm -r build

# web dev (API on :3737, vite on :5173)
READER_PORT=3737 pnpm dev:server
pnpm dev:web

# desktop (after one-time native rebuild, see apps/desktop/README.md)
pnpm --filter @reader/desktop dev

# tests
pnpm -r test

Architecture

apps/
  web/          React + Vite SPA
  desktop/      Electron shell (forks the server on 127.0.0.1, random port)
packages/
  core/         feed parsing (RSS/Atom/JSON Feed/h-feed), transcripts, imports, HTML sanitization — no I/O
  server/       Fastify API, background poller, ingestors, OAuth sign-in, real-time streams, storage adapter (SQLite now, Postgres in M4)

Design spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-01-reader-clone-design.md

License

MIT