54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
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---
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layout: project
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title: "Informinator"
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description: News aggregator built with React and TypeScript
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year: current
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permalink: /projects/informinator
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thumbnail_url: /assets/images/informinator.webp
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project_url: https://informinator.owenryan.us/
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source_url: https://code.owenryan.us/owenryan/informinator
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SEO_tags: [News, FOSS, React, RSS, TypeScript]
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---
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**Note: Informinator will be open-sourced in the near future when the site leaves the testing stage**
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Informinator is a web-based news aggregator that acts as a central place to catch up on current events.
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## Origins
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During the spring 2023 semester, two separate classes I was taking had weekly news quizzes that checked that you had
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been following current events. I decided that the best way to study for these quizzes was to create a news aggregator
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to simplify the process of looking at several news outlets per day.
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The original version of Informinator was hacked together in a weekend and worked much differently than the current
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version. It was written entirely in Python using Aiohttp as the webserver and jinja as the template engine. The server
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did everything from Parse RSS to render HTML, which led to 5+ second load times as every RSS feed had to be fetched
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before HTML was returned. It also only pulled feeds from RSSHub, and thus only featured stories from BBC News,
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Al jazeera, The Associated Press, and Op-eds from The Guardian.
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## Privacy
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Informinator aims to be a privacy-friendly solution for news aggregation. Some information is inadvertently collected to
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prevent spam, but it can be entirely avoided by self-holding your own instance of Informinator.
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The official Informinator instance collects the following information
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- IP address when you load the page - This is logged by the webserver and used to identify Denial-Of-Service (DOS) and
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similar attacks.
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- IP address and RSS feed URL when using the official informinator proxy to load articles - Again used for detecting
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abuse.
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## Current issues
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The first version of Informinator was hacked together over a weekend, so some design choices are suboptimal. Some of these include:
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- All articles are loaded on page-load, even though most are hidden behind the carousel.
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- Informinator's RSS parsing code only supports feeds from [RSSHub](https://docs.rsshub.app/en/).
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- RSSHub's New York Times English feed is currently unusable due
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to [a parsing error](https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/issues/12371).
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- All articles are cached in Python when an in-memory database such as Redis would greatly improve performance.
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## Roadmap
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Informinator's public roadmap can be found [here](https://informinator.owenryan.us/roadmap).
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