Behind the Scenes of Read Rust

On 3 Jan 2018 the Rust blog put out a call for community blog 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 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
• Computer Science
• Crates
• Embedded
• Games and Graphics
• Operating Systems
• Performance
• Rust 2018
• Tools and Applications
• 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 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.

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.

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 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.net.
• 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.

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

Update: Read Rust is now hosted on AWS and delivered via CloudFront.

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!