Telescope is an open-source, real-time social news site built with Meteor

Note: Telescope is beta software. Most of it should work but it's still a little unpolished and you'll probably find some bugs. Use at your own risk :)

Learn More

• Telescope Site
• Telescope Demo
• Telescope Meta – Discussions about Telescope

License

• Telescope is distributed under the MIT License

Features

• Real-time (of course!)
• Password-based and/or Twitter auth
• Notifications
• Mobile-ready & responsive
• Invite-only access for reading and/or posting
• Markdown support
• Day by day view

Installation

• Install Meteor
• Install Meteorite
• Download or clone Telescope into /some/path
• cd /some/path
• Run mrt

Running Telescope on Heroku

• Use the Heroku buildpack for Meteorite to push to Heroku: heroku create --stack cedar --buildpack https://github.com/oortcloud/heroku-buildpack-meteorite.git
• Add MongoHQ addon

Running Telescope on EC2

• Check out Dirk Krause's installation script for EC2.

First Run

• Set the root URL variable used for Twitter auth (on Heroku: heroku config:add ROOT_URL=http://your_url)
• Set the mail URL variable used for email notifications (for example, with Mailgun on Heroku: heroku config:add MAIL_URL=smtp://postmaster%40YOUR_DOMAIN.mailgun.org:YOUR_PASSWORD@smtp.mailgun.org:587/)
• Fill in your Twitter keys (by clicking on "Sign Up/Sign in" in your Telescope top bar)
• The first user account created will automatically be made admin
• Check out the settings page and fill out basic things like the site's name

Local Variables

Meteor uses local environment variables for a few things, such as configuring email. While this is straightforward to do on Heroku (see above), on a local dev environment the best way is to set up an alias for the mrt command.

For example, to configure Meteor to use Mailgun for email, in your .bash_profile file just add: alias m='MAIL_URL=smtp://username:password@smtp.mailgun.org:587/ mrt'

This can also be useful for starting Meteor on a specific port: alias m4='MAIL_URL=smtp://username:password@smtp.mailgun.org:587/ mrt --port 4000'