Swen has been a hobby project I kept to myself for almost 2 years. I needed to get through a lot of news fast. Continuous browsing through many websites was time-consuming and a battery waster. I used feed reader apps with multiple feeds on different subjects. The apps pulled more data than I needed, images and all that. Most were only compatible with feeds and couldn’t add Reddit feeds or json files. I wanted something more flexible and portable. A friend recommended Jimmyr.com. However, it was old, not maintained and had ads.
One weekend, I learned VueJS and built a basic website after watching a YouTube video. As a VueJS newbie, it was an achievement. Since then, I use it for my news brief daily. Added Features and cleaned up code along the way. It now has two level tabs and reads text aloud.
The hardest part was making tabs work seamlessly while navigating without errors. Later, to reduce eyestrain, I added the text-to-speech feature with Web Speech API. With some VueJS experience under my belt, implementing it wasn’t complicated as I expected. Few people with whom I shared it with liked it. After sharing on Reddit, I wrote this blog post.
You can check the website at: https://swen.ml
The features include:
- Use different Reddit frontend. (e.g. https://swen.ml/?r=reddi.tk)
- Read text out loud with Web Speech API
- Control the voice setting through the gear icon along with the play/pause/stop button
- Remove news items you’ve already read
- Built with minimum resource usage in mind. It only loads the first page and rest load as needed while navigate other tabs.
- There are no ads and tracking on the website except for CloudFlare CDN, which is used to cache static elements of the website to reduce server load and serve users globally.
Video Preview:
I hope the project helps users to save some time and gather useful information from the different sections listed on the website. I intend to make it open source when the code is more stable and with additional customization features for regular users. I consider it to be in alpha stage so if anyone would like to contribute, please let us know.
