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Feed the Fire

Feed the Fire is a combination of web frontend and a backend process to synchronize RSS or Atom feeds with Firebase.

Feeds are fetched every 10 minutes and updated if neccessary. Changes in the feed's content will show up through the usual Firebase events like child_added. For example, to fetch the latest XKCD comics:

var ref = new Firebase("https://feeds.firebaseio.com/xkcd");
ref.child("meta").once("value", function(snapshot) {
  $("#e-title").html(snapshot.val().description);
});
ref.child("articles").on("child_added", function(snapshot) {
  var article = snapshot.val();
  var link = $("<a>", {"href": article.link, "target": "_blank"});
  $("#e-list").append($("<li>").append(link.html(article.title)));
});

A live version of this service is running at FeedTheFire.in.

A public Firebase hosting 50 of the most popular feeds is also available at https://feeds.fireabaseio.com. Forge access is unavailable, please use the JS client, iOS / Node.JS SDK, or the REST API to access the data.

Architecture

The project is split into two components:

  • The frontend is contained in its entirety in index.html. This code is responsible for accepting an RSS/Atom URL, a Firebase URL and optionally, a secret from the user and storing it in a Firebase dedicated to this application.

  • The backend, app.js, is a node process responsible for listening to changes to user data, fetching feeds every 10 minutes, writing the feeds to the appropriate Firebases, and updating the status of each feed.

The backend writes the content of the feed under two top-level keys, articles and meta. The meta object contains information about the feed, such as its description, title and published date. The articles object contains the individual feed items, ordered by date. The prirority for each of these articles is set to the timestamp at which the article was published, so all the child_added callbacks will be invoked in order.

License

MIT.