PlainWire

About & Support PlainWire

PlainWire is a minimal, privacy-first news aggregator. Every page is under 50KB, uses minimal JavaScript (theme persistence only), and sets no cookies or tracking pixels.

How It Works

  1. Curate — We aggregate headlines from vetted, reputable sources like Reuters, AP, BBC, CBC, DW, and Wikipedia Current Events.
  2. Categorize — Stories are automatically sorted into categories: World, Politics, Business, Health, Entertainment, Style, Travel, Sports, Science, Climate, Weather.
  3. Serve — Pure HTML is generated and served from a lightweight C server. No frameworks, no build tools, no bloat.

What's Included (Free)

  • ✔ Daily curated headlines from 60+ countries
  • ✔ 12 news categories with SVG icons
  • ✔ RSS & Atom feed output
  • ✔ JSON API access (/api/news)
  • ✔ Full article text extraction
  • ✔ Read-aloud with voice selection
  • ✔ Dark/light mode with system detection
  • ✔ Weekly digest & archive
  • ✔ Search across all headlines
  • ✔ Custom font family & size
  • ✔ OPML export of all sources
  • ✔ PWA support (installable)

Technical Details

  • 🔒 No PII collected — zero tracking
  • ⚡ Pages <50KB, loads on 2G networks
  • 💻 Single-file C server (fully auditable)
  • 🌐 Vanilla HTML + minimal inline CSS
  • 🛡 No external JavaScript libraries
  • 🔍 Multi-threaded with connection pooling
  • 📡 RSS/Atom feed parsing via libcurl
  • 🌍 IP-based country detection
  • 🔒 Rate limiting per IP
  • ⚙ Gzip compression built-in
  • 📊 Real-time stats dashboard
  • ♻ Open-source architecture
Sources

We rely on established, editorially independent news outlets:

Custom CSS (Plus)

Inject your own CSS to personalize PlainWire’s appearance. Saved to your session.