Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms.
But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love!
When BIG_FREE_READER
shuts down, your instance of Stringer will still be kicking.
The app is currently under active development, please try it out and report any issues you have.
Stringer is a Ruby app based on Sinatra, ActiveRecord, PostgreSQL, Backbone.js and DelayedJob.
Instructions are provided for deploying to Heroku (runs fine on the free plan) but Stringer can be deployed anywhere that supports Ruby (setup instructions for a Linux-based VPS are provided here, and for OpenShift, provided here).
git clone git://github.com/swanson/stringer.git
cd stringer
heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku config:set SECRET_TOKEN=`openssl rand -hex 20`
heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku restart
heroku addons:add scheduler
heroku addons:open scheduler
Add an hourly task that runs rake fetch_feeds
Load the app and follow the instructions to import your feeds and start using the app.
In the event that you need to change your password, run heroku run rake change_password
from the app folder.
From the app's directory:
git pull
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku restart
Keyboard Shortcuts
You can access the keyboard shortcuts when using the app by hitting ?
.
You can run Stringer at http://reader.yourdomain.com
using a CNAME.
If you are on Heroku:
heroku domains:add reader.yourdomain.com
Go to your registrar and add a CNAME:
Record: CNAME
Name: reader
Target: your-heroku-instance.herokuapp.com
Wait a few minutes for changes to propagate.
ReederApp Support (experimental)
Stringer implements a clone of Fever's API so it can be used with any mobile client that supports Fever.
Use the following settings:
Server: {path-to-stringer}/fever (e.g. http://reader.example.com/fever)
Email: stringer (case-sensitive)
Password: {your-stringer-password}
Currently, only reading is supported and this is kind of a hack so please report any issues you run into. If you have previously setup Stringer, you will need to migrate your database and run rake change_password
for the API key to be setup properly.
Stringer has been translated to several other languages. Your language can be set with the LOCALE
environment variable.
To set your locale on Heroku, run heroku config:set LOCALE=en
.
If you would like to translate Stringer to your preferred language, please use LocaleApp.
Clean up old read stories
If you are on the Heroku free plan, there is a 10k row limit so you will eventually run out of space.
You can clean up old stories by running:
rake cleanup_old_stories
By default, this removes read stories that are more than 30 days old (that are not starred). You can either run this manually or add it as a scheduled task.
Run the Ruby tests with rspec
.
Run the Javascript tests with rake test_js
and then open a browser to http://localhost:4567/test
.
To get started using Stringer for development simply run the following:
bundle install
rake db:migrate
foreman start
The application will be running on port 5000
You can launch an interactive console (ala rails c
) using racksh
Most of the heavy-lifting is done by feedzirra
and feedbag
.
General sexiness courtesy of Twitter Bootstrap
and Flat UI
.
Matt Swanson, mdswanson.com @_swanson