From bf7aace3b2eeb829160ff7e101781441dd82f9da Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Egor Aristov <ef@efprojects.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2025 23:52:17 +0300
Subject: [PATCH] readme

---
 README.md | 30 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 29 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index f3152b2..5536977 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1 +1,29 @@
-Project is in POC stage, codebase is really dirty, deployment and usage is not recommended. pull requests are not accepted yet. project is published only for convinience. release date is unknown.
+# RSS Alchemy
+
+## About
+
+RSS Alchemy is a website-to-rss converter, like RSSHub, RSS-bridge or Rss.app. Here is the difference:
+
+- Convert arbitrary website to RSS feed using CSS selectors
+- Dynamic websites are supported using headless chrome (playwright)
+- Cookies[^1] (supports scraping private feeds, eg youtube subscriptions)
+- Proxy
+- Results caching
+- Screenshots (primarily for debugging)
+- Stateless[^2] (all task parameters are encoded into url, no database needed)
+- Distruibuted by design (deploy as many workers as you need)
+- Self-hosted; easy to deploy; docker-compose provided
+- Relatively small codebase, written in go + typescript
+
+[^1]: Cookies require support from your RSS reader/aggregator. Miniflux works, others are not checked yet.
+[^2]: Nats KV is used to store cookies permanently, it's required for sites that update cookies on every request, like youtube 
+
+| program/feature      | RSS Alchemy               | RSS Hub                      | RSS-Bridge              | RSS.app       |
+|----------------------|---------------------------|------------------------------|-------------------------|---------------|
+| Custom websites      | ✅ (using CSS selectors)   | ❌ (only hardcoded site list) | ✅ (using CSS selectors) | ✅             |
+| Render dynamic sites | ✅ (using headless chrome) | ❌                            | ❌                       | ✅             |
+| Hosting              | Self-hosting              | Self-hosting                 | Self-hosting            | Only cloud    |
+| Price                | Free and open-source      | Free and open-source         | Free and open-source    | Paid ($8/mon) |
+
+## Project status
+Program is still under development. The code architecture is not final, tests are missing, no CI, no demo page, no docs, etc...