LivingKiosk

Newsprint

A calm front page for a screen you are not staring at.

What this is

Newsprint reads a set of news feeds and sets them like a newspaper front page — one lead story, the rest in columns — then quietly turns its own pages. It is the anti-ticker: nothing crawls, nothing flashes red, nothing counts down. Just a headline, where it came from, and how old it is, in type you can read from across the room.

It is meant for a screen nobody is watching closely — a spare monitor, a TV in the corner, a wall panel, or your Mac desktop wallpaper.

Where the news comes from
Whatever you point it at: any RSS or Atom feed, and any subreddit. Point it at wire services for news, or at three hobby subreddits and nothing else. Feeds are fetched by this server, not by the screen, and cached for ten minutes.
What happens when a feed breaks
It keeps showing that feed’s last good copy and says so quietly in the source bar — r/worldnews · rate limited — rather than blanking. One dead feed can never take the page down, and a failed feed is left alone for a few minutes before being retried.
What you can change
The sources, light or dark, how many headlines share a page, how long a page is held before it turns, and whether it turns at all. Everything lives in the URL, so configuring a screen means pasting a link into it — there is nothing to log into and no settings stored on the server.

What it looks like

Real screenshots, taken minutes apart, so the settings are the only thing changing between them.

A dark front page with a lead story and two columns of headlines from BBC, NPR, Hacker News and the Guardian.
Dark — the built-in wire sources
The same front page set in black type on a warm off-white ground.
theme=paper — the same page on warm off-white
A dark front page built from three hand-picked technology feeds instead of the wire services.
feeds= — Ars Technica, The Verge, Hacker News
A paper-themed front page holding only six headlines, with generous space beneath them.
theme=paper, limit=6 — a short page, more turns
A dark front page packed with twenty headlines across two columns.
limit=20 — as much as the screen will take

Settings

What to read

Leave both of these empty and you get a sensible wire-service front page: BBC World, NPR, Hacker News and the Guardian. Fill either in and yours replaces it entirely.

Add

Using the built-in default sources.

Paper

Dark suits most rooms and most desktops. Paper suits a bright wall, a light desktop, or an e-ink-ish panel. This page changes with it, so you can see the choice.

Pace

A ceiling, not a promise: the page measures itself and steps this down until it fits the screen, so a phone shows fewer headlines and more pages rather than clipping.

A black scrim over the whole page, for a screen that shares a room with a bed.

Anything from 5 seconds to 3600 (an hour). The turn itself is a slow dissolve — the point is that you never catch it moving.

Advanced

Preview

The real front page, at this size — it settles a moment after you stop typing, because each reload fetches the feeds properly.

Showing /Open full screen ↗

Your kiosk URL

This is the product. Everything above lives in it, so one running copy can serve as many different screens as you like.

Put it on a screen

The page refreshes itself every five minutes and folds new copy in on the next page turn, so nothing needs babysitting and nothing reflows while someone is mid-headline.