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📡 Built "rundown" — An AI-Powered RSS Reader at Railway Hackathon

#nextjs #showdev #railway #hackathon

📝 Overview

"rundown" crawls your subscribed RSS feeds every 15 minutes, detects new or updated articles, and sends you a neat AI-powered summary. You can tweak the summary language & length, and get notifications via Discord Webhook.

source code: https://github.com/howyi/rundown

I jumped into Railway Hackathon 2025 and built "rundown" — an AI-powered RSS reader that keeps an eye on your feeds, auto-summarizes new content, and pings you when something fresh drops. Here’s a quick tour of what it does, how it’s built, and what it was like to make it all happen on Railway.

The app is live on Railway at https://rundown.sbox.studio (not sure how long I’ll keep it up after the hackathon 🥴).

📝 Overview

"rundown" crawls your subscribed RSS feeds every 15 minutes, detects new or updated articles, and sends you a neat AI-powered summary. You can tweak the summary language & length, and get notifications via Discord Webhook.

✨ Key Features

📚 1. RSS Feed Registration & Management

Add as many RSS feeds as you like and manage them all in one place.

RSS Feed Registration

🔍 2. Update Detection + AI Summarization

Every 15 minutes, it scans your feeds, finds the new stuff, and summarizes it using gpt-5-nano. Multi-language & adjustable length support included.

AI Summarization

🗓 3. Timeline View

See all your summarized articles in chronological order, with easy browsing of past updates.

Timeline

🔔 4. Discord Webhook Notifications

Get instant updates in your Discord channels — perfect for teams or communities.

Discord Webhook Notifications

🔗 5. MCP Integration

Hook it into your own tools and grab feed/article data programmatically.

You can connect to the MCP server running at rundown.sbox.studio/mcp using an API key generated from the settings page.
The MCP server is built with Vercel’s mcp-handler

MCP Integration

🛠 Tech Stack

Frontend & Auth

  • Next.js for UI + Backend-for-Frontend
  • better-auth for simple email/password login

Backend Processing

  • BullMQ + Redis for async jobs
  • OpenAI gpt-5-nano for AI summaries

Database

  • PostgreSQL for feeds, articles, summaries, and user settings

⚙️ Built on Railway

Everything’s running on Railway as separate services:

  • Next.js App
  • BullMQ Worker
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Bootstrap (runs migrations + re-registers cron jobs after deploy)

Railway Infrastructure

The code’s open-source here → GitHub 🐙
You can also spin up your own with this Railway Template — just drop in your OpenAI API key and you’re good to go.

💡 Takeaways

Railway made the whole multi-service setup ridiculously smooth — from creating services to managing env vars and logs. It’s a great fit for hackathons where you want to focus on building, not fighting your infrastructure.

Next steps? More notification channels and fancier diff analysis.
If you’re thinking about joining the next Railway Hackathon — do it. You’ll ship fast, meet cool people, and have fun doing it.

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