I am working with Bret Comnes in looking for a way to create a Atom feed gateway for microformat websites. Bret recently created a Heroku app to create an Atom feed for the IndieWebCamp IRC log. Here are some notes from the IRC log from this week’s Homebrew Website Club meetup in Portland:

• bret: we have two examples to work off of/use already: http://waterpigs.co.uk/services/microformats-to-atom/ and http://h-reader.aws.af.cm/feed/atom?url=http://www.sandeep.io/
•  andy: tried both with my site (andysylvester.com), Barnaby’s service works with my site (was able to subscribe to the feed URL), Sandeep’s did not return any entries.
• andy:I took a look at Barnaby’s Github account, I did not see any projects there that looked like his MF to Atom service
• bret: here is my idea, you trigger on some kind of new content event (like a new post or an edit) to send a webhook or webmention to the atom gateway. this parses your h-feed and generates the updated atom feed. when that is ready, ping the pubsubhubbub hub
• andy: that sounds good, I assume this could be built to feed Barnaby’s service or another service

In my test of the first example, I entered my URL and got a full URL with query back in addition to the Atom feed (http://waterpigs.co.uk/services/microformats-to-atom/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fandysylvester.com). I then added this URL to my Selfoss feed reader, and was able to subscribe to the Atom feed.

Here are some possible user scenarios/stories:

• If someone wanted to follow postings from a microformat website, and used a RSS/Atom feed reader, they could use the Barnaby Walters service to subscribe to that site.
• If someone was publishing a microformats website, and wanted to provide an Atom feed to readers, they could use the Barnaby Walters service to get an Atom feed of the h-entry feed and then provide that to a PubSubHubBub hub, or provide a local copy of the Atom feed. Another option would be to provide a full query URL like the one I showed above for your site as part of a RSS feed link from your site.

Any other thoughts/ideas?

 

I noticed that Bret Commes has created an app to produce an Atom feed of the daily IRC log from the IndieWebCamp IRC channel. I tried adding the feed (http://iwc-log-feed.herokuapp.com/atom.xml) to my Selfoss feed reader, but it does not seem to show up, will have to look at the error log to see if there is a problem. I was able to read the feed from The Old Reader, so the app is working! Great job, Bret!