Every morning I'd open Gmail, scroll Twitter, hop over to Hacker News —
and somehow read the same OpenAI announcement over and over while missing
the small Anthropic update that actually mattered. Tabs full of the same
story, none of the signal.
Syndicate is the fix.
👋 Why this exists
The constraint that shaped the architecture was simple: no server, no monthly bill.
Which meant re-inventing the usual "Postgres + cron + S3 + CDN + Vercel" stack
as things I already had at home:
| 🧠 | Compute | My laptop, on a regular schedule via launchd. No daemon, no always-on box. A missed cycle catches up cleanly within the rolling ingest window — longer absences lose older items. |
| 🤖 | AI | A local small language model (Ollama-served gemma4) for summarization, a local embedding model for dedup. Zero API spend. |
| 📦 | Storage | A second Git repo (news-archive) holds the daily JSON output. Versioned for free, no DB to host. |
| 🌐 | Hosting | GitHub Pages serves the PWA. It fetches its data straight out of news-archive. No backend, no CDN bill. |
Total operational cost: electricity. Total infrastructure: my laptop and two Git repos.
🚀 Get started in 60 seconds
| How to use it | What you run |
|---|
🧑💻 Claude Code plugin
conversational, agent-driven |
/plugin marketplace add aadarshvelu/syndicate
/plugin install syndicate-pipeline@syndicate
/syndicate-pipeline:syndicate-status
|
⚙️ Direct CLI
cron-friendly text output |
git clone https://github.com/aadarshvelu/syndicate.git
cd syndicate && uv sync
cp .env.example .env # fill in what you need
uv run syndicate
|
📱 Read on phone/desktop
PWA, no install |
aadarshvelu.github.io/syndicate
Works offline. Add to Home Screen for native-app feel.
|
Long-form install walkthrough, env-loading mechanics, and publishing notes
live in INSTALL.md.
📱 Read the feed
aadarshvelu.github.io/syndicate
— static React/Vite PWA on GitHub Pages. Reads per-day JSON straight
from the news-archive
repo, caches in IndexedDB, works offline once loaded. No accounts, no
backend, no data leaves the device.
Install it as a phone app (takes 10 seconds):
| 📱 iOS Safari | Open the link → Share → Add to Home Screen → Add |
| 🤖 Android Chrome | Open the link → ⋮ menu → Install app (or Add to Home screen) |
| 💻 Desktop Chrome / Edge | Open the link → address-bar install icon (⊕ in the right side) → Install |
After install, the PWA launches full-screen like a native app. The
service worker caches the bundle so subsequent opens work without
network — only the day's feed JSON is fetched fresh.
✨ What it does
🗞️ Watches every source
