Apparently Gary Teter has also fallen prey to deletion in FeedLand…
Feed Readers
There are 68 posts filed in Feed Readers (this is page 3 of 7).
Lazyweb request – does anyone know of other feed readers besides FeedLand and River5 that support the rssCloud protocol? I am trying to collect data regarding the WordPress rssCloud implementation. Thanks.
Did a test of feedToMasto app from Dave Winer, it worked!
Demo of rssCloud protocol and reallySimple NPM module
In this era of moving away from Twitter, I have been reviewing the rssCloud protocol and think about its potential. I had not done anything about it, but saw this Twitter thread and really liked this comment by Preslav Rachev regarding building on RSS: “And best of all, everyone is free to build their own apps and tooling on top of it without restrictions, or stepping onto each other’s toes.”. I then decided to start playing around….
I read through the walkthrough document on the rssCloud site and decided that the simplest test would be to create some RSS feeds that have rssCloud elements, register them with a rssCloud server, then get the server to contact a server when the feeds updated, then display some information from the feeds. I started with this script from Dave Winer, updated it to provide web output, then ran the script twice to register two different feeds. I then made a video of running the script, posting to feeds using Drummer and FeedLand, then displaying the title or description of the most recent item in the feed, along with the feed name. The video is shown below. Source code and more instructions are available on Github. Let me know what you think!
Looks like FeedLand is getting closer to a public release – yay!
Further explorations of the TweetsToRss tool
Twitter has an API reference page for data contained in a user timeline. I decided to review TweetsToRss to see if some of this data was present. In tweetstorss.js, there is an array called “params”, which sets screen_name to the variable username, and trim_user to “false”. I was thinking that I would have to add some additional parameters to this array based on the API reference page. However, upon further review of the source code, there was some logic to not add replies (lines 437-441):
[cc lang=javascript]
if (flSkipReplies) {
if (thisTweet.in_reply_to_status_id != null) { //it’s a reply
flInclude = false;
}
}
[/cc]
The value of flSkipReplies is set to true in line 36. I changed this line to set flSkipReplies to false, and was able to see replies in the RSS feed – yay!
One last thing – I tested having flSkipReplies set to both true and false, and saw that the version of the RSS feed with replies had 20 items, where the version of the RSS feed with no replies had only 10 items. May still be a thing or two to play around with here….
Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news
My first step was to collect RSS feeds or Twitter handles from news sources. Sadly, the main newspaper in Portland (The Oregonian) does not seem to offer RSS feeds, but I did find some for several other newspapers. What I did find, though, is just about everyone news org is using Twitter to broadcast links to stories. I decided to make TweetsToRss my tool of choice for turning those Twitter timelines into RSS feeds.
Once I had a set of feeds, I made a copy of the single page app for my normal RSS feed reading, and made a few changes to the template. Since I had quite a few feeds, I decided to group them into four categories:
- News Orgs – Newspapers, TV news
- Reporters – Reporters from news orgs as well as freelancers and other people covering the protests
- Groups – Protest groups
- Government – Portland city government (mayor, city council, police bureau, police union) and Multnomah County government (county sheriff dept)
I then modified my template to add tabs for each of these categories. You can see the result here. I am interested in feedback on the design and in suggestions for additions to the feed list. If you have feedback, send it to andy at andysylvester dot com. Thanks!
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