readii

A simply, AI enhanced RSS Reader

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Inspiration

I like to follow software developers on X and their blogs to learn new things and get inspiration. However, it has been difficult to follow everyone regularly and easily.

I'm probably too young to have ever used RSS readers. However, I know the principle well enough that I think it still has a lot of potential today.

On the one hand, I like to use daily.dev as a browser extension, but I don't find the articles sufficiently tailored to sources I like to follow. On the other hand, it was hard to find a simple, modern RSS reader that works similarly as a browser extension.

So I decided to build one myself.

What it does

readii is a simple, modern and AI-powered RSS reader. As a browser extension, it is easy to follow RSS feeds that you like. The AI creates a short summary (tl;dr) for each article so that the essential content of the text can be quickly grasped.

Features:

  • Articles are summarized at the top using the Summarization API
  • Add RSS Feeds from a predefined list
  • Add your own RSS Feed via an input
  • Delete RSS feeds you do not want to follow anymore
  • Articles with no content will directly linked to the respective article URL and marked with an external link icon
  • Articles are refreshed every 24h or manually by clicking the "Refresh" button
  • Light/Dark Theme
  • Supports LTR and RTL layout
  • Responsive Design

How I built it

I built the extension with Svelte 5 as the UI framework. I use CSS with a design system based on CSS Custom Properties. I also use modern web features like CSS Anchor Positioning, HTML popover, CSS oklch, Light/Dark Mode or the View Transition API.

Challenges I ran into

What took me the most time was the correct installation and use of Gemini Nano. I had to deal with some error messages after the installation and sometimes a lack of disk space. Among other things, this also led to a Chromium Bug Report. However, changing self.ai.assistant to self.ai.languageModel improved this significantly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The only dependencies (without dev dependencies) I use is date-fms for formatting dates and sanitizing html via sanitize-html. This not only makes the extension cleaner, but also shows in an impressive way what is possible with web technologies today!

What I learned

Using a UI framework like Svelte 5 with a fine grained reactivity makes you much more productive compared to e.g. React.

What's next for readii

Potential new features I can imagine well:

  • Add a Web App / Native App for better mobile support.
  • Add articles to “My articles” to have permanent access to them.
  • Add Tags incl. AI suggestions to better filter articles by topic.
  • Add articles from websites that are not connected to an RSS feed.

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