Intro ⨉ principles ⨉ roadmap ⨉ housekeeping

[chuanqisun]

Hello! If you still love RSS, despite it's 2021, this community is for you! First, thank you, thank you, thank you for trying out the tool, starring the repo, filing issues, and submitting PRs. I'm humbled by how supportive everyone is. You are making this project where I want to spend my time hacking!

Please allow me to share a few things about this project first:

Principles

This project is conceived as a "Hackable RSS reader". Unlike other SaaS business (thinking Feedly), I DON'T want to decide what you can or can't do with this tool. On the opposite, I want to help you hack it! This means I'll make the following trade-offs when there is no win-win solution:

• Modularity > Integration.
• Control > Simplicity
• Teach you fishing > Give you the fish

Roadmap

I want to make sure we get the foundation right so this project can grow sustainably (Think the growth curve for complexity: I don't want exponential. I want asymptotic). So expect a bigger change to land soon (potentially v2 - I've been regretting not putting a beta in the semver) to set that foundation. I realize that in order to support theming (#16) and customization (#15, #13), I'd have to adopt a more modular architecture:

1. A Headless Content Manager with an opinionated API: download content, and fetch/merge/update cache.
2. A static site generator (SSG): render the RSS reader UI, with theming and customization.
   1. Each rendered UI is powered by a "UI Kit", including one template (html), one or more themes (css), and some javascript
   2. There will be a default UI Kit, probably looking similar to what we have today.
   3. Users can customize on top of the theme by overriding css and injecting more javascript
   4. Power users can customize by building whole new UI Kits. I can provide some unstyled web components to facilitate the process.
   5. The most adventurous user can drop the SSG completely. You can bring your own SSG, (11ty, Gatsby, Hugo...), you can build APIs on top it, or you can render to RSS/Atom xml if you want, e.g. supporting Machine readable output in RSS format #12.

UPDATE I was able to support most items on the roadmap without a breaking change.

• Theming via css override: v1.4.0 and improvement in v1.6.0
• Headless mode: v1.5.0
• Templating: v1.7.0

If you want to propose new features, please use the Ideas discussion

Housekeeping

• At the time, this repo is not quite ready for collaboration--there is no issue template, no CI/CD, no contribution guidelines, no clear roadmap, not even an open backlog. So I apologize for the lack of clarify. Frankly, I really didn't expect so much attention all of a sudden and thought I wouldn't have to worry about those things until much later. So please allow me some time to adapt and organize this repo. If you have good tools or GitHub Actions template to recommend, please share the idea.

UPDATE Since last wrote this, this project has received several rounds of clean up with better docs and contributor experience.

• Issue template is ready
• A basic contribution guide is ready

Finally,

• Please give the GitHub Discussions feature a try:
  • 🙏 Q&A discussion is for asking a question about how to use or configure the tool. You will get faster answer there because the entire community can chime in. Your question will also benefit future users who share the question.
  • 💡 Idea discussion is for sharing an idea about a new feature or an improvement of an existing feature. Since the community can vote, this allows me to see what features will benefit the community the most and help me prioritize the work.
• The classic GitHub Issues page is still perfect for reporting and tracking bugs (e.g. something you'd expect to work but it didn't).

I'll post more updates as soon as I made progress. Thank you again for all the support.