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How the Open Source Bridge River of News app works

Welcome to attendees of the 2017 Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Oregon! If you followed the link from the Open Source Bridge River of News app, this post will explain the tools I used to create the app.

Tool list:

I wanted to create an app to be able to easily follow news about the conference (see my app at FullBlastNews.com for a more complex example of following multiple RSS feeds). To start, I reviewed the conference presenter list and made a list of the available Twitter handles and weblogURLs. Next, I created lists of the blogs and added it to my River5 installation. River5 is a “river of news” aggregator that allows you to follow multiple RSS or Atom feeds and display them as separate lists or rivers.

I also wanted to create a RSS feed of Twitter posts by the presenters and Twitter posts containing the text “osbridge”. To do this, I used the TwitRSS.me web service. The site allows users to create a URL search for a Twitter handle or a Twitter search. I then took these URLs and added them to separate text files to add to my River5 installation.

After adding the lists to River5, three files were created containing a list of items from the combined RSS feeds. I then used the riverBrowser toolkit single page app to display those files.

Requirements:

  • Linux server to run River5
  • Web hosting for the single page

I will be at the Open Source Bridge conference – feel free to reach out if you would like to talk about RSS apps, develop something new, or get some help on setting up your own app (tweet me at @AndySylvester99)!

 

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  • Following up on my post yesterday, here are a list of rivers of news that I have created:

    FullBlastNews.com – An app I put together to display multiple rivers using tabs. Unfortunately, the theme has stopped working in some ways (it won’t jump to sections within the site), but is still a nice app.

    ReadingList – My main list of sites I follow

    OpenSourceBridge – A river I built for the 2017 Open Source Bridge conference (article on how I built the site)

    1999 Bloggers – A river of people using the 1999 blogging tool by Dave Winer