a real-time news aggregator

Morning Serial provides a chronological view of the latest headlines from a variety of different (mostly tech-oriented) websites. Once the page is loaded, new headlines are inserted in the page as they come out in real-time, giving a fresh look at the latest news without any interaction by the user. It also includes a cryptocurrency ticker.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the server up and running on your local machine for development.

Prerequisites

• Node >=8.0.0
  • Check out tj/n or nvm for node versioning
• RethinkDB >=2.3

I recommend using something like direnv to manage project-specific environment variables.

The following envrionment variables need to be set (the values in .envrc.example should be fine):

• PORT
  • Port you want the express server to listen on
• RETHINKDB_PORT
  • The client-driver connection port
• RETHINKDB_HOST
  • Where the RethinkDB instance is hosted
• NODE_ENV
  • development or production
• HOST
  • Hostname of the site, only matters if NODE_ENV=production

Start

1. Make sure RethinkDB is alive before starting
   • $ rethinkdb
2. From the project folder, install the required dependencies
   • $ npm install or $ yarn install
3. Start the server
   • $ npm run start or $ yarn start
     • This starts nodemon and webpack in watch mode. The Javascript is automatically rebundled and the server restarted after each save.

There are two important scripts in the scripts/ folder: feed-worker.js and dl-favicons.js. Run these in node to populate the database and download each source's favicons. The favicon script is also available as a script under package.json (npm run favicons).

Deploy

$ npm run build or $ yarn run build

After running the build script, the dist/ folder should be populated with a copy of the server and static assets.

Run the feed-worker.js script as a cronjob to continue populating the db with new articles. There's an example file that shows the syntax.

dist/server.js contains the code needed to run the Express server.

dist/assets contains all static assets needed for the front-end. Can host these files in a CDN, just make sure that bundle.js and server.js are built in sync to avoid any dissociations between client- and server-rendered markup.

Contributing

Any and all PRs are welcome. Feel free to raise any issues as well.

If there's a cool site that you think the site is missing, adding it is easy if they have an ATOM/RSS feed. Just add the site in the /src/data/types.js file with the name of the site in CamelCase as the key and a dash-separated name as the value. Then add a new file in the /src/data/sources folder, and instantiate a new member of the Feed class (example).

Most of the front-end is built with React and is found in the view folder. The CSS is built with PostCSS plugins (import, cssnext, and short), so use as many features from the latest CSS spec as you want.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgements

• CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations powers the cryptocurrency ticker
• cryptocoins free cryptocurrency SVGs
• HK Grotesk a free, good-looking grotesk
• Zilla Slab display font