I spend a lot of time on sites like daily.dev to keep up with tech. I find myself opening so many tabs or bookmarking items that I never get to. So, I decided to create an application that can help me store links to all the articles I want to read.

"Big deal! How is it any different from saving bookmarks?". I want to make this a terminal application that will show me my stats on startup. These stats will include how many articles I have added to my list, how many I have read already. If it keeps popping up everytime I open a terminal, it will remind me to open up and read an article from time to time. I want to be able to read an article in first in first out method or get a random article to read from my list.

MyReadingBacklog is a work in progress. It is intended to be a terminal application where you can store links to articles you want to read from the web.

• I have created the basic functionality
  • Decide to Use sqlite as a store for the articles.
  • This is a small project and I expect that anyone using it would not have many records.
  • I chose Rust because people talk about it and I think a small scale project like this is perfect to learn.
    • There have been some frustrations which I think are expected given my lack of experience with the language.
    • Shout out to ChatGPT for being super helpful.
      • What I am doing here is not super complex and there are defined ways to do things like writing to db, reading files etc.
      • I found it easier to ask chatGPT and this is the first time I have used it to this extent.
• Articles can be added
• Articles can returned in FIFO order
  • Using minimum Id for now to return articles.
  • A timestamp might be a better choice but minimum Id okay for now.
• Any returned Article id is saved so users can remove them when they are read.
• Statistics for articles read not implemented.
• Nothing implemented for setting up the program to show stats when the terminal is opened
• Some error Handling is missing with regards to passing arguments

• Some stats are being tracked now.
  • The number of articles in queue.
  • The number of articles read.
  • The time of last added article.
  • The time of last read article.
• Next steps is to work on adding some analysis on the stats and printing everything in a nice format.
• After that, will work on setting up so that stats are shown when terminal is opened

• Save links to articles into a queue.
• Get articles from the queue in FIFO order.
• Get random articles from the queue.
• Get stats on how many articles you have read and how many you have added to your list.
• On opening a terminal, show these stats to the user.

• Add a category read feature to organize my articles and read from certain categories.
• Might be clumsy to manually add articles through the terminal, so research some UX improvements.

The following arguments are available now

Add an article

--add <link>

Get article in FIFO order

--get_queue_article

Get a random article

--get_random_article

Mark last retrieved article as read. This removes the article from storage

--article_read

Retrieves the stats for the user

--stats