Daily has gone open source

We have shared some hints and clues along the way but it's time to announce that Daily is now open source! 🎉

dailydotdev / daily

Curated dev news delivered to your new tab 👩🏽‍💻

Daily

Curated dev news delivered to your new tab 👩🏽‍💻

Made by developers for developers

🗞 Daily

Daily is an open source browser extension which provides curated dev news to your new tab.

It gathers and ranks articles from tens of unique sources to help developers stay updated with the most relevant developer news. You can bookmark items, sync your data across devices, and read when you want. It works offline as well and has a progressive web app (PWA) for mobile.

Daily is:

• 🌟 Well-maintained: We are working continuously to introduce new features, fix bugs, and improve user experience — 40+ releases on average in a year.
• ♾ Constantly Updated: Daily's article feed is constantly updated. As soon as new articles get published, they start appearing in Daily.
• 🧵 Open Source: Daily is completely open source. You can see the code to learn how it works…

View on GitHub

The code is available under the organization dailynowco on GitHub and is licensed under Affero GPL 3.0. We have also written our Code of Conduct and we expect everyone to follow ❤️

We would like to thank DEV, Codefund and other open source projects for being such a great resource of how to open source a project! (idea for a new blog post :P). It's all about developer experience and we still have a lot to learn.

This is of course by no means the end of our open source efforts but merely a kickoff. We still have a lot of documentation to write, make sure it is easy to setup a local environment and much more.

We believe that in order to get a community's trust you must be transparent and supportive and open sourcing Daily just make it a whole lot easier. Now everyone can see what is under the hood, freely ask questions and even see how we get money to keep this product running and grow.

As part of this process, we have a few more announces so bare with us:

1. Daily style guidelines and design is also going "open source" and will be publicly available soon. In the meantime we have our Storybook with all Daily components, soon on NPM as well.
   https://storybook.dailynow.co

2. No more paywall content! We believe that content should be free for all so any new paid blog post will be ignored and won't get into our database. The mechanism is still not perfect as Medium make it hard to detect but we will work it out.

3. Daily blog is migrating to DEV! We are looking for a platform which is aligned with our core values and DEV seems like a great fit. Of course, it doesn't mean that we will stop posting on Medium as we have an audience there but everything will be written on DEV and than cross posted instead of the other way around. (This post is already written this way). Hopefully our audience will migrate as well as part of the process :)

That's it! We have a lot to do and we are looking forward to your contributions 🤩

Comments

[Khoa Che]

I installed the extension right after reading this post. Awesome work!

I do have some questions for you as a business focus most on curating content:

1. How do you curate and tagging content? Look up for keywords automatically? I did see an entry on Daily having so much tags that its title gone invisible.
2. What do you plan to optimize personal experiences? From my experience, all curated news sources don't work: Medium, DEV feed, Pocket discover, newsletter digest, blog news feeds, subreddits... For 10 articles in a news feed, less than 1 worth my glance, and there's a small percent that worth saving to reading list. I'd like to specify an expectation like this:

Hey I definitely want to hear about:

• Article targeting novice coder, explaining to them confusing terms with different meanings in different (non-)programming cultures.
• Release annoucement of version 1.0 of the projects I'm interested in (don't notify about verions 0.x)
• Particular programming subject: Async in Python...
• ...

Thanks for reading my rant :)

[Ido Shamun]

First of all, thank you for dedicating the time using the extension and commenting here. Currently we curate content by hand picking the sources and we fetch tags from the blog post tags if exist or meta keywords. I am familiar with the issue you raised with the tags and I need to fix it by limiting the maximum amount of tags per post.
Regarding the personalization, we are looking to integrate a recommendation system and also other sources of content, not just blog posts. This way you will truly be able to get all the content you want and need.

Hopefully it answers your question :)

[Khoa Che]

limiting the maximum amount of tags per post

I think you shouldn't do that if you ever want to provide searching feature. Just pick (some of) the followed tags to show up and display a More... button at last.

Btw, ideally this is the way I want to set up expectations by tags:

#explain #newbie

#release #production any(#guix #entropic #redox)

#async #python

#webdev #python

#security any(#nodejs #python)

Your list of tags should be curated and organized to ensure no duplicate. Then comes a suggesting system to help user type the right tag name.

[Ido Shamun]

It is very hard to curate the tags as well. When you curate content from multiple sources, each source has its own "native" tags and some tags such as release don't even exist there. It will require a sophisticated system for automatically tagging the content. Unless I'm missing something and you have an idea :P

[Khoa Che]

Your tags is under your decision. Just make sure they're unique, e.g. if you decided to use #async and #python, then you would translate "native" #asyncio to them.

Of course I will miss some news, it always happens anyway. And it doesn't matter! They're news I want to know, not what I need. If I need, I will seek them. If I'm in freetime, I will surf the source directly.

So in my opinion, you just have to keep all things relevant, not all relevant things.

[Ido Shamun]

Thank you for pointing it out :)
We still have a lot of work on curating correctly the content and as you mention keep all things relevant (or at least most of them). Hopefully, now that we are open source the community will also help us to accomplish it.

[Ido Shamun]

We have an open issue about the Safari extension:
github.com/dailynowco/daily/issues/41

We are looking for contribution :)