JFET-digest

A minimalistic, automated tech newsletter — inspired by mosfet.net by n-o-d-e.

JFET-digest is a lightweight, low-noise newsletter generator designed to surface only meaningful technological innovation, filtering out politics, corporate drama, and unrelated noise.

It aggregates articles from high-quality sources (MIT News, Wired, TechXplore, IEEE Spectrum, ScienceDaily, …), normalizes the feeds through custom parsers, removes duplicates, strips political content, enhances metadata (images, summaries), and outputs a minimal clean newsletter sent automatically via email.

The goal:
Pure signal, removing noise

This doesn’t allow you to access those websites for free, past the limit of free visits, you’ll need to figure out your ways of accessing the content

Features

Multi-source aggregation

JFET-digest pulls concise, high-quality items from selected tech feeds:

MIT News (Robotics, AI, Engineering, CS)
Wired (AI & Science)
TechXplore (ML/AI, CS, Engineering, Robotics)
IEEE Spectrum (AI, Robotics, Computing)
ScienceDaily (CS, Robotics, Engineering)

Each feed has its own dedicated parser under helpers/.

Intelligent filtering

The system automatically removes:

political content
unrelated editorial or cultural pieces
repeated topics
duplicates across sources
non-technical news

The result: every article is strictly tech and innovation focused.

Image extraction

Many RSS feeds do not expose images consistently. JFET-digest enhances them using:

media:content or media:thumbnail when available
HTML parsing for embedded images
automatic og:image scraping fallback

Ensures each item has a usable preview image.

Email delivery

Uses Resend to send a beautifully formatted HTML digest.

The email design is intentionally minimal, readable, and typography-focused.

Automated scheduling (GitHub Actions)

The system uses two scheduled workflows:

.github/workflows/ ├── prepare.yml # Runs at 04:00 UTC: fetches + parses + stores articles in today.yaml └── send.yml # Runs at 09:00 UTC: reads YAML and sends the newsletter

This separation allows a manual editorial window between collection and sending.

YAML-based editorial workflow

Fetched articles are converted into:

data/ today.yaml # Current day’s draft newsletter (editable) archive/ YYYY-MM-DD.yaml

You may:

edit titles or summaries
remove or reorder items
add custom notes before sending

Each final digest is archived automatically.

Running locally

1. Install dependencies

npm install

2. Environment variables

Create a .env file with:

RESEND_API_KEY=your_resend_key NEWSLETTER_TO=your@email

3. Fetch today’s articles

node scripts/fetchArticles.js

#### 4. Generate YAML

node scripts/prepareYaml.js

node scripts/sendNewsletter.js