Ok, so I’ve been thinking for a bit, and I know there’s a ton of alternative “libre” frontends for websites like YouTube and Reddit. However, I was thinking: what If I just wanted to make my own frontend? Not specifically for the intentions of “libre”, but I wanted to change the controls and appearence of the website. I’m honestly unsure of how to approach this. Any thoughts?
I have no experience. Anyway:
- learn how to make a basic website in some flexible programming language like go, rust or python (django)
- make a list of functionality of your original website you want to provide an alternative frontend for (as a start, you can expand later)
- find a way to retrieve all important data for the most important functionality reliably
- implement it into your website
- make it fancy, expand functionality, use the same webpaths for you website like as the original (so it can easily be redirected with libredirect or similar)
You can also look at and analyze the source code of existing Libre frontends like rimgo (go).
Easyest way, to begin with, is to use a browser addon and userscripts. Addons to look for are Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, or Violentmonkey and alike alternatives. Keyword to google “userscripts”. P.S. As I see it, from your description, you just want some mods (changes) to existing UI, no need to rebuild one from a scratch in other more complicated ways.
I took a look at these, and decided that I’m gonna use something like flask as a lot of people seemed to express privacy concerns over all of them. If you disagree please let me know.
The generalized approach in industry is to use API calls, and create classes to structure the data you receive as JSON or XML. At that point, it is entirely up to you how to format and display the data from your classes. Take a look at some of the Lemmy client code like Mlem, Memmy, or Voyager as examples. Though they have gotten more complicated, they all follow this client-server model for front end development.
However, due to recent shenanigans around API and RSS by companies, mostly those looking to prevent AI companies from using their data for free, the alternative, much worse method is to take the HTML output from a standard web request, and try to reverse engineer the page information into a class structure. This sucks, breaks frequently, and requires you to code around ads and other junk on pages in order to get at the content.
if it were me I would use python with flask and requests to scrape the site and provide the data to alternate frontend. there might be more resource efficient ways to do it but this is what i know.
Scrape the website instead of using an api if the website offers it
Why not using the api? The requests can also be proxied for more secruity
