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+On 3 Jan 2018 the Rust blog put out a [call for community blog
+posts][call-for-posts] that reflected on 2017 and proposed goals and directions
+for Rust in 2018. Responses came in across Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere. I
+was enjoying reading all the posts so decided to build a little website to
+collect them all together: Thus [Read Rust] was born.
+
+Initially it was just an RSS feed of the posts but it soon acquired a list of
+the posts themselves that proved useful as January progressed. The #Rust2018
+period is now over and the [Rust roadmap for 2018][roadmap] has been drafted
+with the responses. Read Rust got linked near the top, which made me happy.
+With January over I had to decided what to do with the site. Since I built the
+workflow for aggregating and publishing posts I decided to continue it past
+January as a more general Rust content aggregator.
+
+Yesterday I launched the update. A number of new categories join the initial
+Rust 2018 category, bringing the list to:
+
+* [All Posts](http://readrust.net/all/)
+* [Computer Science](http://readrust.net/computer-science/)
+* [Crates](http://readrust.net/crates/)
+* [Embedded](http://readrust.net/embedded/)
+* [Games and Graphics](http://readrust.net/games-and-graphics/)
+* [Operating Systems](http://readrust.net/operating-systems/)
+* [Performance](http://readrust.net/performance/)
+* [Rust 2018](http://readrust.net/rust-2018/)
+* [Tools and Applications](http://readrust.net/tools-and-applications/)
+* [Web and Network Services](http://readrust.net/web-and-network-services/)
+
+Each category has its own page and RSS feed in case readers are only interested
+in that category. I also set up a Twitter account, [@read_rust], that tweets
+new posts.
+
+## Tooling
+
+Read Rust is built with the [Cobalt] static site compiler, which itself is
+written in Rust. Most of the content is derived from a central [JSON Feed] file
+that lists all the posts. Each of the category pages uses [Cobalt's support for
+data files][data-files] to load the JSON Feed and render a list of links tagged
+with that particular category.
+
+I also wrote a couple of tools (in Rust) to help with managing the site.
+`add-url` is used to add a new link to the site. It is supplied a URL and one
+or more categories. It then resolves redirects (to remove t.co, bit.ly, etc.)
+to come up with the canonical URL, then fetches the page and with varying
+success extracts the title, description, author, and publication date from it.
+
+A simple `Makefile` combined with the second tool, `generate-rss` takes the main
+JSON Feed and filters it to generate each of the feeds for the different
+categories in both RSS and JSON Feed formats.
+
+All the content and [source code is available on GitHub][readrust-github].
+
+## Design Decisions
+
+### Feeds
+
+The site promotes the RSS and JSON Feeds available. Despite rumours of their
+death, Feed readers are a still a thing and provide a very pleasant reading
+environment without all the ads, tracking and other junk that often accompanies
+some of the alternatives. Additionally the feeds allow the content to be reused
+in other ways. For example Florian Gilcher wrote [a Rust tutorial that uses the
+Read Rust feed to a build command line reader for Read Rust][florian-tutorial].
+
+### Managing Content
+
+Managing the site is a manual process. This was done initially to make getting
+the site online during January as quick as possible. I could have easily put
+together a basic Rails site but that brings along with it more demanding
+hosting requirements, and the need to stay on top of Ruby, Rails, and gem
+upgrades. Being a static site means that it's just a simple collection of files
+that are cheap and easy to host.
+
+The drawback to a static site is it's harder to implement dynamic behaviour.
+I've been able to work around this when needed:
+
+* For post submissions from the community I set up an [issue template in
+  GitHub][issue-template] that pre-fills the issue with prompts for the
+  information I need to add a new post. Given the target audience is likely to
+  have a GitHub account this seems like a reasonable choice.
+* For site search I have a little search form that performs a search on
+  [DuckDuckGo], limited to readrust.com.
+* In order to have the Read Rust Twitter account automatically tweet new posts
+  I was able to leverage the RSS feed and [IFTTT] to tweet each new entry in
+  the feed.
+
+### Privacy, Tracking, and Performance
+
+Read Rust respects your privacy. There are no trackers, analytics, ads,
+crypto-coin miners, or other third party code on the site at all. In fact
+**there is no JavaScript** on the site at all.
+
+The styling, basic as it is, was designed almost from scratch so there's not
+thousands of lines of unused CSS framework downloading behind the scenes.
+There's just 111 lines of CSS, initially derived from
+[bettermotherf\*\*\*ingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/).
+
+My one indulgence is the [Nunito Sans] font, which adds about 40kb.
+
+The page weight for a first time visitor to the home page is about 50kb and the
+site is often fully loaded in 1 or 2 seconds. That's not to say it couldn't be
+smaller of faster (by adding a CDN for example), just that by considering
+choices when building the site, it is fast, responsive, cacheable, and
+respectful of visitors almost for free.
+
+Page load times (fully loaded) reported by [WebPagetest] are:
+
+* 0.533s for New York, USA (where the server is hosted)
+* 1.790s for Sydney, Australia (same country as me)
+* 0.948s for Paris, France
+* 2.130s for Rose Hill, Mauritius
+
+## Conclusion
+
+So that is the process that led to making Read Rust the way it is and how the
+content is managed. If you stumble across an interesting Rust post feel free
+to [submit it][submit]!
+
+[@read_rust]: https://twitter.com/read_rust
+[call-for-posts]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/01/03/new-years-rust-a-call-for-community-blogposts.html
+[Cobalt]: http://cobalt-org.github.io/
+[data-files]: http://cobalt-org.github.io/docs/data.html
+[DuckDuckGo]: https://duckduckgo.com/
+[florian-tutorial]: http://asquera.de/blog/2018-01-20/getting-started-with-rust-on-the-command-line/
+[IFTTT]: https://ifttt.com/
+[issue-template]: https://github.com/wezm/read-rust/blob/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/missing_post.md
+[JSON Feed]: https://jsonfeed.org/
+[Nunito Sans]: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/nunito-sans
+[Read Rust]: http://readrust.net/
+[readrust-github]: https://github.com/wezm/read-rust
+[roadmap]: https://github.com/aturon/rfcs/blob/roadmap-2018/text/0000-roadmap-2018.md
+[submit]: https://github.com/wezm/read-rust/issues/new?labels=missing-post&title=Add+post&template=missing_post.md
+[WebPagetest]: http://www.webpagetest.org/

content/technical/2018/02/read-rust.yaml

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+---
+title: 'Behind the Scenes of Read Rust'
+extra: The design and operation of the little Rust content aggregator I built.
+kind: article
+section: technical
+created_at: 2018-02-04 09:12:00.000000000 +11:00
+keywords:
+- rust
+short_url: