Boggle Nogs

Boggle Nogs is an alternative front-end to Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) which allows for ignoring submissions from certain websites or with titles containing specified strings. You can find a live instance here.

Motivation

I really like Hacker News. It's a great resource for wacky and insightful engineering and tomfoolery. I find myself getting sidetracked perhaps too often with the news articles that are submitted. They tend to garner a lot of attention and make it to the front page, and I don't leave the comment section feeling any better off (it's also telling that I don't read the articles myself).

So, Boggle Nogs, a front-end that can filter out content that I would otherwise find myself reading but not really getting anything out of.

And for you, it's whatever you'd like it to be. Ignore submissions from your arch-nemesis, shun the latest developments in the impending world takeover by frogs, or add .* to your ignore-titles.txt file for the most sophisticated experience.

Requirements

Go; I'm currently using version 1.19, but I suspect it'll work with older or newer versions.

Building

Clone the repo, open the main folder, and run go build.

Usage

Running Boggle Nogs

Run:

./boggle-nogs

Command line arguments

--port: specify the port to run on

--ignore: specify folder which contains ignore-sites.txt and ignore-titles.txt. If not given, will assume the current directory is where they are found.

There are technically other arguments, but considering I don't think they do anything or work, I'd just ignore them.

Updating ignore/block lists

To ignore submissions from a given website, add the website's base url on a new line in ignore-sites.txt. For example, to ignore all submissions from my website:

... (other site domains)
joshuaoreilly.com

To ignore submissions containing a specific string in their title, add the string on a new line in ignore-titles.txt. For example, to contain all submission titles which contain the word "Frog":

... (other title strings)
Frog

Boggle Nogs uses RegEx to match sites and titles; if you'd like to ignore submissions from "oreilly.com" but not from "joshuaoreilly.com", put the following in ignore-sites.txt:

^oreilly.com$

Likewise, for ignoring all submission titles that contain the word "Frog", regardless of their capitalization, put the following in ignore-titles.txt:

(?i)frog

Docker

Run:

sudo docker run -p 8080:8080 -v /path/to/ignore-files:/app/ignore oreillyjoshua/boggle-nogs:1.0.1

Or with docker-compose:

version: "3.0"

services:
  boggle-nogs:
    image: oreillyjoshua/boggle-nogs:1.0.1
    container_name: boggle-nogs
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /path/to/ignore/folder:/app/ignore

TODO

• Update docker hub README
• Allow for head.html, etc. to be stored somewhere else
• Create function to handle creating regex to avoid repetitive code
• Use to non-root user
• Build docker image
• Decide on and standardize ignore-naming (is it ignore? ignored? blocked? etc.)
• Grey text alternative with better background contrast