Categories

Miniflux checker

Miniflux Checker
Miniflux Checker is a Firefox WebExtension that tracks unread items in a Miniflux RSS reader account. Specifically, it does the following:

• Provides a toolbar icon that indicates the number of unread feed items
• Creates desktop notifications when new items are detected

Setup

1. Install Miniflux Checker either from its addons.mozilla.org listing or its GitHub page.
2. Open the extension's preferences page from Addons manager and set the Miniflux URL and credentials. A token is preferred over username and password, see usage notes.
3. Place the toolbar icon in a visible location if you want to see the number of unread items.

Usage notes

• Clicking the toolbar icon checks Miniflux for an update of the unread count and triggers notifications of any new items.
  
  • It only checks the current Miniflux state. It does not trigger Miniflux to refresh its feed data.
• The time between checks of the Miniflux state can be set in the preferences.
• Notifications can be disabled in the preferences.
• The maximum number of notifications shown in one check can be set in the preferences. If there are more, a final notification is shown with the number of additional new items. This behavior is used to avoid a flood of notifications from a noisy feed.
• Notifications use the feed's favicon by default. In preferences, one can select to the Miniflux Checker icon for all notifications instead.
• The last updated item's ID is stored internally. Only one notification should ever be shown for a given item.
  
  • This ID can be reset in the preferences in case the Miniflux account changes.
• The token/password is stored in the extension's local storage, effectively in clear text on the file system.
  
  • For this reason, using an API token is recommended since control over the account is not compromised if it is revealed.
  • Tokens can be generated in the "API Keys" section of Miniflux's settings for Miniflux versions 2.0.21 and later.

Ideas for future features
Miniflux Checker meets the author's original design goals, but here are some ideas for other features that could be added:

• Reuse the credentials of a current browser session so no credentials need to be stored in preferences.
• Open the Miniflux page from a notification or from the toolbar icon.
• Show popup listing of unread items when clicking on toolbar icon.
• Trigger refresh of Miniflux feeds when checking Miniflux.
• Mark iems read from notifications or from the toolbar icon.

References

• Miniflux
• Miniflux Notifications (Google Play, GitHub)
  • This project was only discovered after Minflux Checker was written. Otherwise, that project would have been ported to Firefox rather than creating a separate project. The Firefox Add-ons site was searched before writing Miniflux Checker but not the Chrome store. The feature request for in-client notifications was also monitored but nothing was posted there.
• Miniflux Checker (this project) (Firefox Add-ons, GitHub)