Research Paper Visit/Reading Monitor and Feed

System which monitors what I'm reading via a browser extension and publishes a feed: https://dmarx.github.io/papers-feed/

At present, only arxiv is supported, with plans to support other journals/sources in the future.

How it works

The system is comprised of the following components:

• https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-src
  • repository which contains most of the source code for this system
• https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed
  • repository used as a data lake
  • pulls in https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-src as a submodule
• https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-src/tree/main/extension
  • Browser extension which monitors my pageviewing activity
  • When I interact with an arxiv URL, the browser extension logs the interaction to the data lake repo (here) by creating a github issue on it
  • This is possible because I created a PAT narowly scoped to this repository which is registered in the extension's options
• https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed/.github/workflows
  • Issues are processed by github actions workflows which invoke scripts installed from https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-src
  • Data is persisted to https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed/data
• https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-src/src/scripts/frontend
  • Aggregated results are injected into a simple webpage template which is hosted via github pages

How to set this up to monitor your own reading

1. Create a new repository from the template here: https://github.com/dmarx/papers-feed-template
2. Configure repository settings

• Configure github pages to deploy from the gh-pages branch
• Give actions write permissions on your repo

3. Install the browser extension located in papers-feed-src/extension
4. Create a a github PAT with permission to create issues on your papers-feed repo
5. Register the PAT in the browser extension's options

To test that everything is set up correctly, visit an arxiv /abs/ or /pdf/ page. Shortly after visiting:

• an issue with the label "paper" should be created
• opening that issue should trigger the process-events.yml workflow, which in turn should trigger but build-and-deploy.yml workflow. you should see these activities logged in the repository's Actions tab
• after a few minutes, the frontend should be available via gh-pages at <username>.github.io/<repo-name>

Acknowledgements

• Thank you to anthropic for making a decent LLM (I made claude write nearly all of this)
• Thank you also to https://github.com/utterance/utterances, which inspired how this project (ab)uses github issues as a database