https://github.com/ruslanlesko/digestwave
As you may remember from one of my previous articles, I was looking to start a new pet project. Now I am happy to announce that I am starting Digestwave: a news aggregator which doesn’t spy on you and allows adding new sources by committing into the source code.
The goal of the project
I am starting Digestwave to create a news aggregator which will include articles from websites I follow. Unfortunately, Flipboard or Apple News do not support any news sites from Ukraine. The solution should allow adding any website by publishing Pull Requests. Feel free to follow its development on the GitHub repo. Eventually, it will be available on this website: https://digestwave.com
Since this is my pet project, I can make it ad-free. And consequently, there is no need to track user data and sell it.
To summarize, Digestwave has a goal of obtaining 2 main properties:
- Ad-free, privacy-oriented news aggregator
- Flexibility for adding new sources
Having used some one-size-fits-all solutions, I decided to try implementing a native experience for each of the following platforms:
- Web (HTML, CSS, vanilla JS?)
- iOS (SwiftUI)
- Android (Jetpack Compose)
The idea is to make font-ends as responsive and fast as possible. Technologies for mobile apps were selected by looking at the latest first-party UI frameworks.
This is just the beginning, so I don’t have any specific assumptions on when and how the project will become more or less usable. However, I do have a list of milestones I want to achieve by the end of 2022:
- Backend solution with minimal features and news sources. It should be able to periodically fetch and parse articles for later exposing them from public API.
- Web client to render news feed and open each article.
- Automation for publishing backend as Docker images.
- Ability to deploy it locally (both backend and web client) using a single command via Docker Compose.