10 ms·

Goread - Open Source Google Reader clone in Go

196 points by obilgic 13y ago

kzahel 13y ago
I tried to import my feed.ly feeds to this but the page stuck on "OPML import is happening. It can take a minute. Don't reorganize your feeds until it's completed importing. Refresh to see its progress." and I got no errors in the javascript console. It looks promising though. I find feed.ly to be too gimmicky and noisy. I like the minimal style of go read. One thing that's missing from every google reader replacement I've tried is the ability to infinite scroll through a feed history. Somehow google knew how to request RSS feed pagination parameters.
- mcantrell 13y ago
  I made a feed reader called Bulletin that has infinite scroll that works just fine. Can't see why others couldn't do it as well. We also went for minimal on the UI. bulletin.io
piyushranjan 13y ago
I have been using this as google reader replacement. Very happy with it.
chankey_pathak 13y ago
It's a nice alternative.
obilgic 13y ago
Website is powered by Go and AngularJS. Source code is available on Github [0] [0] : https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread
- rodgerd 13y ago
  Thanks. I was wondering why it being powered by Go would be relevant when there appeared to be no way to self-host or contribute...
circuiter 13y ago
Looks like Matt Jibson is on a front page roll.
- mjibson 13y ago
  Yeah. I was surprised to see these since they are both old news.
stinos 13y ago
Does someone have a more in-depth description of what exactly happens when I'd log in with a google account there, besides "Google will share your email address with Go Read" and "Go Read may use your email address to personalize your experience on their website"? Or is that really all there is to it?
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  Yes, this permission only shares your email.
  - unwind 13y ago
    Sharing an email address is not the same as sharing email, is it? At least your reply just confused me more. :)
    - patrickaljord 13y ago
      You're only sharing your email address. Anyway, this is well documented and this level of paranoia is rather ridiculous anyway.
- tklovett 13y ago
  Here is what happens on Go Read's end: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/user.go#L46-L58 https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/user.go#... Here is the information that Go Read stores per user: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/types.go#L32-L40 https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/types.go...
SkippyZA 13y ago
Great job. I have been working on a similar Google Reader replacement using Ruby and Ember.
fooyc 13y ago
This is the most approaching clone of Google Reader I've seen so far. It has one big problem, however: A feed can have only one tag (or, if you see a tag as a folder, a feed can be only in one folder). This is a big problem because Google Reader's UI encouraged to add multiple tags on a feed (you didn't moved a feed from one folder to an other : you selected a list of tags the feed appear in). And the OPML format allows this too. So, if you import an OPML export, half your feeds may appear to be missing. --- An other great Google Reader alternative is http://yoleoreader.com/ http://yoleoreader.com/ . Apart from its UI sometimes freezing for a second (maybe due to synchronous I/O or too long script execution), it's an other great Google-Reader-like RSS reader.
- shrikant 13y ago
  I personally use https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ and found it to be a simple and brilliant Reader-like replacement.
  - BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
    I've been enjoying https://digg.com/reader https://digg.com/reader as a "close-enough to Google Reader" substitute, as well. They launched a mobile-browser-friendly update a few days ago, and the Android app is supposedly "very soon" to release.
  - lilc 13y ago
    Same here. And most important to me, it implements the Google Reader API, so my filtering scripts continue to work.
- mwexler 13y ago
  Big is relative, of course. I don't think I ever used that feature of Google Reader, and it's unclear how many others depended on it as well. That being said, of course, it's a great feature to have.
- kip_ 13y ago
  I'm rather happy with http://bazqux.com/ http://bazqux.com/ Granted, it's a one man shop, but he's charging $9-$29/year, so hopefully enough to keep it running. It's written in Haskell and Ur/Web, is quite fast, took my Google Reader takeout with no issues (400 feeds scattered across 35 folders) Allows login via Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID.
davidw 13y ago
Do you have to self host? If not, how are they going to keep it around once more people start to use it? Looks nice and clean. Thank you!
- loumf 13y ago
  It's hosted on Google App Engine. He has ads on the free version and an ad-free subscription option. You can self host if you want and it would probably stay under the free tier on AppEngine if it's just you (depending on the number of feeds and update frequency)
- mjibson 13y ago
  You can either pay or self host (which is quite simple).
camus 13y ago
Very good ! i also checked http://yoleoreader.com/ http://yoleoreader.com/ which is amazing too. i'm building my own with nodeJS. As usual my requirement are that it should work without javascript on , so i implemented the static site first ,the rest will come later : http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/ http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/ click on about for the source code.
skrause 13y ago
For me the end of Google Reader meant that I could finally stop using my Google account altogether since Reader was their only service I was using. It's a shame that so many of the Google Reader alternatives want me to sign in with my Google account again. In that case I simply won't use them (I'm looking at you, Feedly).
- kazagistar 13y ago
  Well, if you find it worthwhile, feel free to submit a merge request that adds the authentication method of your choice, right?
  - levosmetalo 13y ago
    This attitude is what's wrong with the open source software. It is important to him, but not that important to spend time getting to know code base in a language he might not be familiar with in order to implement it himself. Or he just might not be a programmer. If you want actual users for your project, not developers, than either implement what they ask for or say you don't want to. If enough people complain, it is a good sign that you are missing important features that prevent adoption. Build it yourself is not an answer to those users, and is just plain annoying. If you want to be able to answer with "send me a pull request" then just stop creating end users software, and build some library instead that is used by developers.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      I'm in no way sure who you replied to was the owner, so your entitlement rage may have been aimed incorrectly. That said, maybe the software isn't targeted at you? One of the beautiful things about open source is that contributors get to contribute on their own terms. Unlike many commercial products where targeting anyone and everyone willing to purchase it is the goal, having a completely free product allows the author to do away with all of that if they desire. This isn't the market you are used to. You, as an end user may have very little power. I understand that the complete change of being catered to by commercial products and then ignored in an open source product can be frustrating. Just keep in mind, that frustration is built by your own misunderstanding of your place in the open source ecosystem. The sooner you accept your place, or change it, the better.
squidi 13y ago
HTTPS URL is https://go-read.appspot.com/ https://go-read.appspot.com/
rly_ItsMe 13y ago
I tried fever http://feedafever.com/ http://feedafever.com/. Its a nice selfhosting feed reader. But after a while using online feed readers i still use Operas build in Reader.
kodr 13y ago
Well... since everyone are sharing their readers, I'll share mine: http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ The one feature that most others don't have, sharing and commenting with friends.
- anovaskulk 13y ago
  On the other hand this one is closing its registrations, and deleting users registered after some date X.
  - pronoiac 13y ago
    They were talking about letting unpaid customers go, but they found backing, to let them keep up the good work: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-reader http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-re...
- adestefan 13y ago
  It's also really slow, can't seem to keep track of my read items, and has been down an awful lot the past month. I had high hopes, but it's close to the point where I'm starting to look for something else. Again.
jc4p 13y ago
Very cool to see my co-worker's pet project front and center on HN when I wake up :) Matt's also working on an Android app for Goread at the moment, which is also open source: https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/ https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/
WayneS 13y ago
I really wanted to like this but it was missing a couple key features for me. I described by problems in the github issues page and wondered back the theoldreader. When theoldreader got slow and was down for over a day I came back and found he has continued to make fixes and addressed most by my issues. Very happy now, and the website is consistently responsive which I care about much more than fancy layouts.
joshbaptiste 13y ago
Wow goread.io is much more responsive then when I first tried it around a month ago .. definitely will start contributing on Github.
egeozcan 13y ago
The only thing I don't understand about this otherwise awesome project is that it being tied to the Google app engine.
- mjibson 13y ago
  That's why it's so awesome. What don't you understand? I get infinite scaling and the datastore. When goread hit the HN front page and the gizmodo front page a few weeks ago, it wasn't any slower: everything scaled perfectly. Consider some of the other readers that have hit the HN front page - they became unusable for a day or two until the traffic died down. App engine is an incredible platform for developing scalable websites.
  - egeozcan 13y ago
    Yes, that's true when you want to scale. What I'm looking for is something that can run efficiently in my cheap VPS, me being the only user. For that purpose, I'd guess, App engine would be an overkill.
caiob 13y ago
Reader clones are the new Todos.
- jfb 13y ago
  And written in Go? HN catnip.
MattSayar 13y ago
I switched to Goread.io as my full-time Reader replacement since I first heard about it after the announcement of Reader's demise. It's been a decent alternative, but it lacks the polish that Reader had, especially when it comes to read/unread stories. After weeks of use, I haven't bothered to figure out the consistency of how to mark a story as read, so sometimes it will take frequent clicks on "Mark all as read" to register that I've read something. When you click a story, it awkwardly jumps your scroll position around. These are minor complaints, and it's still very usable otherwise, but I'm thinking about upgrading my subscription to encourage development.
- mjibson 13y ago
  The jumping around got fixed last week. No one has reported the read/unread issues you've had. Could you report them to the github issues page? https://github.com/mjibson/goread/issues https://github.com/mjibson/goread/issues
ForFreedom 13y ago
Are the unread RSS feed entries stored in db then called to be read later?
- mjibson 13y ago
  Sort of. goread tracks a global unread date. Anything newer than that is unread. Any item you have read since then is added to a big list that is used to filter returned items. When you've read everything, it moves up the unread date and clears the list.
ForFreedom 13y ago
Can I set this up on my own server from github?
- mjibson 13y ago
  Yes. https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread has details.
specto 13y ago
So far very impressive. Definitely worth $30 a year
spurgu 13y ago
It looks nice and it's FAST! Plus it has a clean mobile UI. I think I'll have a Go and leave Feedly on the shelf, at least for a few days.
rkalla 13y ago
Matt, this is really kind of fantastic... nicely done! Would love to see a breakdown blog post of how you architected/implemented this... extremely responsive, pleasing UI, no surprises. Just works.
jqgatsby 13y ago
This is really awesome. I've been using this for a few days now and really like it. I've been programming in Go alot these days, so the fact that it's in Go is a big plus for me.

196 points by obilgic 13y ago

I tried to import my feed.ly feeds to this but the page stuck on "OPML import is happening. It can take a minute. Don't reorganize your feeds until it's completed importing. Refresh to see its progress." and I got no errors in the javascript console. It looks promising though. I find feed.ly to be too gimmicky and noisy. I like the minimal style of go read. One thing that's missing from every google reader replacement I've tried is the ability to infinite scroll through a feed history. Somehow google knew how to request RSS feed pagination parameters.

mcantrell 13y ago
I made a feed reader called Bulletin that has infinite scroll that works just fine. Can't see why others couldn't do it as well. We also went for minimal on the UI. bulletin.io

piyushranjan 13y ago

I have been using this as google reader replacement. Very happy with it.

chankey_pathak 13y ago

It's a nice alternative.

obilgic 13y ago

Website is powered by Go and AngularJS. Source code is available on Github [0] [0] : https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread

rodgerd 13y ago
Thanks. I was wondering why it being powered by Go would be relevant when there appeared to be no way to self-host or contribute...

circuiter 13y ago

Looks like Matt Jibson is on a front page roll.

mjibson 13y ago
Yeah. I was surprised to see these since they are both old news.

stinos 13y ago

Does someone have a more in-depth description of what exactly happens when I'd log in with a google account there, besides "Google will share your email address with Go Read" and "Go Read may use your email address to personalize your experience on their website"? Or is that really all there is to it?

patrickaljord 13y ago
Yes, this permission only shares your email.
- unwind 13y ago
  Sharing an email address is not the same as sharing email, is it? At least your reply just confused me more. :)
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    You're only sharing your email address. Anyway, this is well documented and this level of paranoia is rather ridiculous anyway.
tklovett 13y ago
Here is what happens on Go Read's end: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/user.go#L46-L58 https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/user.go#... Here is the information that Go Read stores per user: https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/types.go#L32-L40 https://github.com/mjibson/goread/blob/master/goapp/types.go...

SkippyZA 13y ago

Great job. I have been working on a similar Google Reader replacement using Ruby and Ember.

fooyc 13y ago

This is the most approaching clone of Google Reader I've seen so far. It has one big problem, however: A feed can have only one tag (or, if you see a tag as a folder, a feed can be only in one folder). This is a big problem because Google Reader's UI encouraged to add multiple tags on a feed (you didn't moved a feed from one folder to an other : you selected a list of tags the feed appear in). And the OPML format allows this too. So, if you import an OPML export, half your feeds may appear to be missing. --- An other great Google Reader alternative is http://yoleoreader.com/ http://yoleoreader.com/ . Apart from its UI sometimes freezing for a second (maybe due to synchronous I/O or too long script execution), it's an other great Google-Reader-like RSS reader.

shrikant 13y ago
I personally use https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ and found it to be a simple and brilliant Reader-like replacement.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
  I've been enjoying https://digg.com/reader https://digg.com/reader as a "close-enough to Google Reader" substitute, as well. They launched a mobile-browser-friendly update a few days ago, and the Android app is supposedly "very soon" to release.
- lilc 13y ago
  Same here. And most important to me, it implements the Google Reader API, so my filtering scripts continue to work.
mwexler 13y ago
Big is relative, of course. I don't think I ever used that feature of Google Reader, and it's unclear how many others depended on it as well. That being said, of course, it's a great feature to have.
kip_ 13y ago
I'm rather happy with http://bazqux.com/ http://bazqux.com/ Granted, it's a one man shop, but he's charging $9-$29/year, so hopefully enough to keep it running. It's written in Haskell and Ur/Web, is quite fast, took my Google Reader takeout with no issues (400 feeds scattered across 35 folders) Allows login via Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID.

davidw 13y ago

Do you have to self host? If not, how are they going to keep it around once more people start to use it? Looks nice and clean. Thank you!

loumf 13y ago
It's hosted on Google App Engine. He has ads on the free version and an ad-free subscription option. You can self host if you want and it would probably stay under the free tier on AppEngine if it's just you (depending on the number of feeds and update frequency)
mjibson 13y ago
You can either pay or self host (which is quite simple).

camus 13y ago

Very good ! i also checked http://yoleoreader.com/ http://yoleoreader.com/ which is amazing too. i'm building my own with nodeJS. As usual my requirement are that it should work without javascript on , so i implemented the static site first ,the rest will come later : http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/ http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/ click on about for the source code.

skrause 13y ago

For me the end of Google Reader meant that I could finally stop using my Google account altogether since Reader was their only service I was using. It's a shame that so many of the Google Reader alternatives want me to sign in with my Google account again. In that case I simply won't use them (I'm looking at you, Feedly).

kazagistar 13y ago
Well, if you find it worthwhile, feel free to submit a merge request that adds the authentication method of your choice, right?
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  This attitude is what's wrong with the open source software. It is important to him, but not that important to spend time getting to know code base in a language he might not be familiar with in order to implement it himself. Or he just might not be a programmer. If you want actual users for your project, not developers, than either implement what they ask for or say you don't want to. If enough people complain, it is a good sign that you are missing important features that prevent adoption. Build it yourself is not an answer to those users, and is just plain annoying. If you want to be able to answer with "send me a pull request" then just stop creating end users software, and build some library instead that is used by developers.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    I'm in no way sure who you replied to was the owner, so your entitlement rage may have been aimed incorrectly. That said, maybe the software isn't targeted at you? One of the beautiful things about open source is that contributors get to contribute on their own terms. Unlike many commercial products where targeting anyone and everyone willing to purchase it is the goal, having a completely free product allows the author to do away with all of that if they desire. This isn't the market you are used to. You, as an end user may have very little power. I understand that the complete change of being catered to by commercial products and then ignored in an open source product can be frustrating. Just keep in mind, that frustration is built by your own misunderstanding of your place in the open source ecosystem. The sooner you accept your place, or change it, the better.

squidi 13y ago

HTTPS URL is https://go-read.appspot.com/ https://go-read.appspot.com/

rly_ItsMe 13y ago

I tried fever http://feedafever.com/ http://feedafever.com/. Its a nice selfhosting feed reader. But after a while using online feed readers i still use Operas build in Reader.

kodr 13y ago

Well... since everyone are sharing their readers, I'll share mine: http://theoldreader.com/ http://theoldreader.com/ The one feature that most others don't have, sharing and commenting with friends.

anovaskulk 13y ago
On the other hand this one is closing its registrations, and deleting users registered after some date X.
- pronoiac 13y ago
  They were talking about letting unpaid customers go, but they found backing, to let them keep up the good work: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-reader http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-re...
adestefan 13y ago
It's also really slow, can't seem to keep track of my read items, and has been down an awful lot the past month. I had high hopes, but it's close to the point where I'm starting to look for something else. Again.

jc4p 13y ago

Very cool to see my co-worker's pet project front and center on HN when I wake up :) Matt's also working on an Android app for Goread at the moment, which is also open source: https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/ https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/

WayneS 13y ago

I really wanted to like this but it was missing a couple key features for me. I described by problems in the github issues page and wondered back the theoldreader. When theoldreader got slow and was down for over a day I came back and found he has continued to make fixes and addressed most by my issues. Very happy now, and the website is consistently responsive which I care about much more than fancy layouts.

joshbaptiste 13y ago

Wow goread.io is much more responsive then when I first tried it around a month ago .. definitely will start contributing on Github.

egeozcan 13y ago

The only thing I don't understand about this otherwise awesome project is that it being tied to the Google app engine.

mjibson 13y ago
That's why it's so awesome. What don't you understand? I get infinite scaling and the datastore. When goread hit the HN front page and the gizmodo front page a few weeks ago, it wasn't any slower: everything scaled perfectly. Consider some of the other readers that have hit the HN front page - they became unusable for a day or two until the traffic died down. App engine is an incredible platform for developing scalable websites.
- egeozcan 13y ago
  Yes, that's true when you want to scale. What I'm looking for is something that can run efficiently in my cheap VPS, me being the only user. For that purpose, I'd guess, App engine would be an overkill.

caiob 13y ago

Reader clones are the new Todos.

jfb 13y ago
And written in Go? HN catnip.

MattSayar 13y ago

I switched to Goread.io as my full-time Reader replacement since I first heard about it after the announcement of Reader's demise. It's been a decent alternative, but it lacks the polish that Reader had, especially when it comes to read/unread stories. After weeks of use, I haven't bothered to figure out the consistency of how to mark a story as read, so sometimes it will take frequent clicks on "Mark all as read" to register that I've read something. When you click a story, it awkwardly jumps your scroll position around. These are minor complaints, and it's still very usable otherwise, but I'm thinking about upgrading my subscription to encourage development.

mjibson 13y ago
The jumping around got fixed last week. No one has reported the read/unread issues you've had. Could you report them to the github issues page? https://github.com/mjibson/goread/issues https://github.com/mjibson/goread/issues

ForFreedom 13y ago

Are the unread RSS feed entries stored in db then called to be read later?

mjibson 13y ago
Sort of. goread tracks a global unread date. Anything newer than that is unread. Any item you have read since then is added to a big list that is used to filter returned items. When you've read everything, it moves up the unread date and clears the list.

ForFreedom 13y ago

Can I set this up on my own server from github?

mjibson 13y ago
Yes. https://github.com/mjibson/goread https://github.com/mjibson/goread has details.

specto 13y ago

So far very impressive. Definitely worth $30 a year

spurgu 13y ago

It looks nice and it's FAST! Plus it has a clean mobile UI. I think I'll have a Go and leave Feedly on the shelf, at least for a few days.

rkalla 13y ago

Matt, this is really kind of fantastic... nicely done! Would love to see a breakdown blog post of how you architected/implemented this... extremely responsive, pleasing UI, no surprises. Just works.

jqgatsby 13y ago

This is really awesome. I've been using this for a few days now and really like it. I've been programming in Go alot these days, so the fact that it's in Go is a big plus for me.