I was contemplating if I could easily send a PR or two towards the NewsBlur repository on GitHub and the install directions seem fairly well detailed, but also extremely daunting to just setting up a “hackable” development environment. Have you considered maybe doing something like setting up a clonable Ubuntu VM image that could help bootstrap development environments?
It would almost be great too if somehow there was an easy way to build a version of the main web interface that was truly “client-like” and let you hack on the main web templates but target the production API like you might if you were working on any other client. I realize from glancing at the repository it would probably be a fairly big refactor/rewrite, but maybe something to keep in the back of your head should the time come for the next major NewsBlur rewrite to consider making the website itself an API client.