Turn a spare monitor or an old laptop into a news wall

Pick the screen

Any screen a computer can drive will do. The three common setups are a second monitor plugged into the computer you work on, an old laptop with its lid open on a shelf, and a small computer such as a Raspberry Pi connected to a TV or a wall monitor.

The board sizes itself to the screen. A 27-inch monitor gets a grid of about nine cards; a laptop gets fewer, larger ones. Headlines are set big enough to read at a distance, so a wall-mounted screen works as well as one on a desk.

Open the board and go full screen

On the computer that drives the screen, open app.feeds.bar in a current browser. Start the free trial, or enter your key if you already bought FeedsBar for your Mac. The same key works in both places.

If the screen is a second monitor, drag the browser window onto it. Then press F or click Full screen. After a few seconds without the mouse moving, the cursor and the controls hide and only the board is left. Press Esc to leave full screen.

In settings you can add a ticker along the top, the bottom, or both, choose how often a card turns, and switch between light and dark. A dark board suits a room with the lights down; a light one is easier to read in daylight.

Keep the screen awake

Keep screen awake is on by default. It uses your browser’s Screen Wake Lock, which current versions of Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox support. While the board is visible, the display will not go to sleep.

Two things can still turn it off. A browser lets go of the wake lock when its window is hidden or minimized, so keep the board in front. And on a laptop, closing the lid sleeps the computer whatever the browser asks. If the screen goes dark anyway, set the computer’s own display sleep to never for that machine.

Bring it back after a restart

A dedicated screen should come back on its own after a power cut or an update. On a Mac, the tidy way is a Safari web app. Open app.feeds.bar in Safari, choose File, then Add to Dock, and FeedsBar becomes an app of its own with no browser bars around it (Apple’s guide). Then add that app under System Settings, General, Login Items & Extensions, so it opens when the Mac starts (Apple’s guide).

A Safari web app keeps its own storage, separate from Safari itself, so the first time you open it, start the trial or enter your key inside the web app. Each place you enter the key counts as one of its five activations. After that, restarts do not ask again. If you clear the site data, the key needs entering once more.

On a Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi behind a TV makes a cheap, silent news wall. The Raspberry Pi Foundation publishes a step-by-step kiosk mode tutorial that boots a Pi straight into a full-screen web page. Follow it and use https://app.feeds.bar as the page. It needs a Raspberry Pi 3 or newer with at least 1 GB of memory, because current browsers will not run on older models.

One thing to do first: a kiosk has no keyboard, so start the trial or enter your key with a keyboard and mouse plugged in, then switch to kiosk mode. The browser remembers both. We have not run these steps on a Pi ourselves yet. If you do, we would like to hear how it went at hello@feeds.bar.

Why a board and not a ticker

A scrolling line of text asks your eyes to follow it at its pace. That works at arm’s length and fails across a room. The board does the opposite: large cards that hold still, and change one at a time, so you can glance at the wall, read a headline, and look away. The tickers are there if you want motion along the edges. On the screen you work at, the FeedsBar Mac app runs a slim ticker instead.