A Google Reader clone for the agent era — an RSS/Atom feed 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.
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.
- Feed reading — RSS 2.0 / Atom subscriptions, background polling with conditional GET (etag/last-modified), adaptive refresh intervals, exponential backoff on failures
- OPML import — move subscriptions in from any other reader in one go
- 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, Bluesky, and Reddit timelines as feeds, or several feeds merged into one AI-filtered, summarized view; digest modes and LLM keep/drop threshold
- 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
| 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 import, pinboard view, unread-only navigation, and the hosted deployment behind Cloudflare Access.
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).
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 testapps/
web/ React + Vite SPA
desktop/ Electron shell (forks the server on 127.0.0.1, random port)
packages/
core/ feed parsing, HTML sanitization, shared types — no I/O
server/ Fastify API, background poller, storage adapter (SQLite now, Postgres in M4)
Design spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-01-reader-clone-design.md