About

🔗 Lynx  ·  Go Temporal PostgreSQL Kafka

Lynx is a personal link and feed management service — a place to save, organise, and enrich URLs and RSS/Atom feeds without handing that data to a commercial read-later or bookmarking platform.

Why I Built It

I wanted to own my reading list. Existing bookmarking tools work well enough, but they’re third-party services with their own retention and privacy trade-offs. Lynx runs on my own infrastructure and stores everything in a PostgreSQL database I control.

It also gave me a realistic project to practice building an asynchronous enrichment pipeline: when a URL is saved, a Temporal workflow fetches the page, extracts metadata (title, description, Open Graph tags, language, author, canonical URL), archives the raw HTML and readable plain-text to object storage, and writes the enriched record back to the database.

What It Does

  • Website/bookmark tracking — store and browse URLs with deterministic UUID v5 deduplication on the normalised URL, so saving the same link twice is safe.
  • Feed management — track RSS/Atom feeds and link them to a parent website.
  • Automatic enrichment — on creation, a Temporal workflow fetches, parses, and archives each URL in the background.
  • Magpie integration — each new website is published as a magpie.v1.Resource Kafka event so downstream services (search index, graph DB, etc.) can pick it up without tight coupling.
  • Bulk import — the CLI reads a Markdown file of bullet-point URLs and creates website records for all of them in one shot.

Tech Stack

  • Backend: Go, ConnectRPC, PostgreSQL
  • Workflow orchestration: Temporal
  • Messaging: Kafka (Redpanda in local development)
  • Object storage: MinIO (S3-compatible)
  • Frontend: WebAssembly SPA written in Go using go-app

For a deeper look at how the pieces fit together, see ARCH.md.