Signal — a personal tech dashboard

A static dashboard that pulls tech news (RSS), AI papers (arXiv API), and device reviews (RSS) on a schedule and displays them in one feed. No server, no database — scheduled scripts write JSON, a static page reads it.

tech-dashboard/
├── scripts/
│   ├── fetch-news.js       RSS: tech news
│   ├── fetch-papers.js     arXiv API: AI/ML papers
│   ├── fetch-reviews.js    RSS: device reviews
│   ├── fetch-reddit.js     Reddit's public .json endpoints
│   └── summarize.js        optional: rewrites summaries with an LLM
├── public/
│   ├── index.html          the dashboard itself (search + theme toggle built in)
│   └── data/                news.json, papers.json, reviews.json, reddit.json (generated)
└── .github/workflows/
    ├── update-data.yml     refetches data every 6h and commits it
    └── deploy-pages.yml    deploys public/ to GitHub Pages on push

The dashboard now has: a card grid layout, a Latest strip (items from the last few hours), filters for category, source, date range, and hardware-only, a search box, save/bookmark with personal notes, a share button that copies a ready-to-post blurb, a ☐ theme toggle, and it quietly re-checks for new data every 5 minutes without a full page reload.

• Hardware highlighting — any item whose title/summary mentions chips, GPUs, specific device categories, robotics, etc. gets a ⚡ Hardware badge and can be isolated with the "⚡ Hardware" filter pill. The keyword list lives in HARDWARE_KEYWORDS near the top of the <script> block in public/index.html — edit it freely to match what you actually care about.
• Saved items + notes — click "☆ Save" on any card to bookmark it (button becomes "★ Saved") and a small notes box appears where you can jot down why it caught your eye. Click "★ Saved" in the filter row to see only your saved items. This is stored in your browser's localStorage, tied to that one browser — it won't sync across devices, and clearing browser data will clear it too.
• Share — click "⇪ Share" on any card to copy a ready-to-paste blurb (title, the why-it-matters note if there is one, and the link) to your clipboard, ready to drop into a tweet, Slack message, or newsletter.

Weekly digest (content engine)

scripts/generate-digest.js turns the past 7 days of dashboard items into a proper digest: an intro, highlights grouped by category with a one-line note each, a closing line, and a parallel thread version (5-8 short numbered posts) for X/Twitter or similar. A separate workflow (.github/workflows/generate-digest.yml) runs this every Monday at 14:00 UTC, and you can also trigger it manually any time from the Actions tab.

Browse digests at public/digests.html on your deployed site (linked from the main dashboard's "📰 Digests" button) — pick a week from the list, then Copy as Markdown to paste straight into Substack, Buttondown, a blog post, or a repo file, or Show thread version to copy something tweet-shaped.

Like the summarizer, this uses Groq (free) by default, falling back to Anthropic if that key is set instead, and falls back further to a rule-based digest (using existing summaries, no new writing) if neither key is set — it never fails to produce something, it just gets better prose with a key. Same secrets as the summarizer (GROQ_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY) — no extra setup needed if you already added one for the "why it matters" notes.

To try it locally: npm run digest (writes into public/digests/). To force a fresh one on GitHub right now: Actions tab → Generate Weekly Digest → Run workflow.

Sample placeholder data ships in public/data/ so the page renders immediately — run the fetch scripts (below) to replace it with live data.

1. Run it locally

npm install
npm run fetch:all      # pulls live news, papers, and reviews into public/data/
npm run serve          # serves public/ at http://localhost:8080

(npm run serve uses http-server via npx — no need to install it globally.)

2. Customize your sources

• News / reviews: edit the FEEDS array in scripts/fetch-news.js and scripts/fetch-reviews.js. Any RSS/Atom feed URL works — most sites expose one at /feed, /rss, or /rss.xml even if it's not linked in the nav.
• AI papers: edit the CATEGORIES array in scripts/fetch-papers.js. See the arXiv category taxonomy for the full list (e.g. cs.CV for computer vision, stat.ML for stats/ML).
• Reddit: edit the SUBREDDITS array in scripts/fetch-reddit.js. Also change the USER_AGENT string to include your actual Reddit username — Reddit rate-limits generic/default user agents more aggressively.
• Look and feel: all styling is in the <style> block of public/index.html — colors are defined once as CSS variables at the top (a second set under :root[data-theme="light"] covers light mode).

AI summaries + "why this matters" notes (optional)

By default, summaries are the raw excerpt from each RSS feed or API, and there's no "why it matters" note. scripts/summarize.js can generate both using an LLM — it tries providers in this order, using whichever key is set:

Option A — Groq (free, recommended)

1. Go to console.groq.com/keys, sign up (no credit card required), and create an API key.
2. Locally: export GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_... before running npm run fetch:all (or npm run summarize alone, to re-process existing data).
3. On GitHub Actions: repo → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret, name it GROQ_API_KEY, paste the key. The workflow already passes it through.

Groq's free tier (roughly 30 requests/minute at the time of writing) is comfortably enough for a personal dashboard refreshing every few hours.

Option B — Anthropic (paid, used only if no Groq key is set)

Same steps as above but with an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY from the Anthropic Console — this uses paid API credits, usually a fraction of a cent per article with the small model this script uses.

If neither key is set, scripts/summarize.js detects that and skips itself — everything else keeps working with the raw excerpts and no "why it matters" notes.

3. Deploy for free

Option A — GitHub Pages (recommended)

1. Push this project to a new GitHub repo.
2. In the repo, go to Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source, and select GitHub Actions.
3. The included deploy-pages.yml workflow will publish public/ on every push to main.
4. The included update-data.yml workflow refetches your sources every 6 hours and commits the new JSON, which triggers a redeploy automatically.
5. You can also trigger either workflow manually from the repo's Actions tab (workflow_dispatch).

Option B — Netlify / Vercel / Cloudflare Pages

Connect the repo, set the publish directory to public, and it will deploy on every push. Add the update-data.yml workflow as-is — it commits fresh JSON to the repo, and your host's own auto-deploy picks it up.

4. Extend it

Ideas, roughly in order of effort:

• LLM summaries — in a fetch script, pipe each summary through an LLM API call to get a tighter 1–2 sentence summary instead of the raw RSS excerpt.
• More categories — add a fourth fetch script (e.g. fetch-reddit.js using Reddit's public .json endpoints) and a matching filter pill in index.html.
• Read/unread state — store seen article links in localStorage and dim items you've already opened.
• Search — add a text input that filters allItems by title/summary in the existing render() function.
• History / database — once you want to search across weeks of articles rather than just the latest fetch, move from flat JSON files to SQLite and a small server (e.g. Express) that serves query results.

Notes on scraping vs. APIs

Every source here uses RSS or a public API — not HTML scraping — because feeds are explicitly meant for this, are far more stable, and avoid ToS gray areas. If you add a source with no feed or API, check its robots.txt and terms of service before scraping its HTML, and keep your fetch frequency low (every few hours is plenty for a news dashboard).