Hacker News Reader

Comment by adhamsalama | Hacker News Reader

I faced the same issue, but I wanted to use my Kindle to read RSS feeds without relying on my PC, phone or Amazon, so I built a FOSS web-based RSS reader compatible with the Kindle browser. It may make your life a lot simpler.

Link: https://inkfeed.xyz Repo: https://github.com/adhamsalama/inkfeed-reader

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Hello Adham! Great solution, but I'm having an issue using my Paperwhite 7 Generation in the Kindle web browser. When I try to click on any of the already saved feed, a pop up appears showing the following: loadFeed error: 'undefined' is not an object. Maybe you have already encountered an issue like this. Thanks in advance!

Sorry for the delay. Will check it out.

It's hard for me to debug this because I don't have a Paperwhite 7. I assume it's a JS compatibility issue but not where the exact root cause.

Since the reader is Open Source, can you run it on your machine and view it on your local network to debug and tell me what's the issue so that I can fix it?

On Kindle 7’s outdated WebKit, both feed loading and article opening failed because the code relied on Set and DOM properties(too modern) that were missing, causing “undefined is not an object/function” errors. I could fix it by adding defensive null/type checks across DOM and helper functions, and implementing a full Set polyfill (has, add, delete, clear, forEach) to ensure compatibility without changing the existing logic. Now that I'm checking, the Hacker News articles don't correctly load. Only shows the URL.

It would be great if you opened an issue on GitHub (or a PR) so we can fix this. I definitely want this to work on all Kindles including older models. Thank you.

Interesting project! I’d love to self-host but can’t find the backend server code - could you share a link to its repo?

I haven't open sourced the Backend yet, but the reader frontend repo is fully working without the Backend. The Backend is used for emailing yourself and doing file conversion on the Backend instead of the Kindle to save battery.

So without the Backend you're only missing the email feature. All you need is a proxy to bypass CORS.

To be honest I was thinking of keeping the Backend closed source to add subscriptions ($1 per month) to cover the hosting (4$), which means I only need 4 users to break even haha.

Will think about open sourcing the Backend and get back to you.

I discovered this post while reading Hacker News on my Kindle BTW.

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