Feeds

There are 76 posts filed in Feeds (this is page 1 of 8).

Making your own media

A few days ago, Dave Winer talked about “making your own media”, meaning that individuals could create lists of sources and distribute them. Dave called for Democratic podcasts, but he has a podcast “river of news” site with multiple podcasts. I thought – why not create a river of news site for some other list of sources as an example?

I recently became aware of a blogging challenge called Blaugust (during the month of August, natch!). On their media page, they had a link to an OPML file of all the participants. I copied that file, added it to my River5 subscription list, and created a river of news site for that list of bloggers. I have instructions on how to do this for yourself – so get busy!

For the record, I have added a link to my OPML feed list in the Links section of my navigation bar (My Blogroll/Feed List). However, I had to add a Links block in my list of widgets before I could see it – grrr!

Updating my River5 install

I have had some problems recently in getting the web reader feature in my River5 RSS reader install to work. Since I recently revised my main subscription list to create a blogroll OPML file, I decided it would be good to perform a clean install and start fresh with a smaller set of feed lists. I am recording the following steps to document my work.

  • Completed backup of current river5 folder from server
  • Saved my latest feed list as readinglist.txt
  • Found post about River5 callbacks, could not find my callback script
  • Looked at artcasting site, saw how I used a modified form of riverbrowser.js to display the pictures
  • Deleted river5 install on server
  • Uploaded clean River5 install from Github to river5 folder on server
  • Updated package.json to recent changes (allowing latest Node.js version)
  • Updated config.json to current content (removing initial tab setup from Github, setting max number of items in a river, setting podast download flag to FALSE
  • Updated lists folder
  • Added exampleRiver4Callback.js from C:\NodeApps\Rivers to callbacks\addToRiver folder on server
  • Did npm install, no issues
  • Did forever stop river5.js (had to, since server would not allow me to run new app)
  • Did node river5.js, watched startup in Putty, saw web view of lists
  • Did forever run river5.js
  • Checked my reading list app, saw new river file, all is well!

Using ChatGPT to convert a list of feed URLs to OPML

After seeing the interest in blogrolls by Dave Winer, I decided to spend some time updating my RSS subscription list and learning about using ChatGPT as a programmers’ assistant at the same time. I use the River5 feed reader, along with a single page web app to display my feeds. River5 supports having a feed list as a text file with one feed URL per line. I wanted to see how well ChatGPT could create an OPML subscription list from this text file.

Here was my first prompt:

Create a Javascript program to run under Node.js. The program should take as input a text file that contains one URL on each line. The program should output an OPML file with the URLs added to the outline such that the file can be uploaded to a feed reader that uses OPML as an input source for subscriptions. In addition, create a package.json file for this program.

This created an app which ran without an error, and created a basic OPML file. Each element had the type attribute set to “rss”. However, the text and xmlUrl attributes were both set to the feed URL. I decided to experiment to see how much further ChatGPT could go.

Here was my second prompt:

Create a Javascript program to run under Node.js. The program should take as input a text file that contains one URL on each line. The program should output an OPML file with the URLs added to the outline such that the file can be uploaded to a feed reader that uses OPML as an input source for subscriptions. The program should also fetch a copy of each URL, and if a feed is available, get the value of the <title> element within the <channel> element and set the text attribute of each entry in the OPML file to the <title> element for that feed/URL. If the feed is not available, set the text attribute of each entry in the OPML file to the URL value. In addition, create a package.json file for this program.

I was more specific here, asking that each feed URL be read to try to get the title of the feed and set the text attribute to the feed title. This version had a small programming error, but I easily fixed it, and the script was able to run without a problem. The output OPML file was able to fill in a lot of the titles, but some feeds still had problems (in particular, Blogspot blogs and other blogs using Atom instead of RSS). Also, this version created a separate “_attributes” element within the outline element, which did not have the same look as an example OPML file I reviewed.

Based on my review, I created a third prompt:

Create a Javascript program to run under Node.js. The program should take as input a text file that contains one URL on each line. The program should output an OPML file with the URLs added to the outline such that the file can be uploaded to a feed reader that uses OPML as an input source for subscriptions. The program should also fetch a copy of each URL, and if a RSS feed is available, get the value of the <title> element within the <channel> element and set the text attribute of the entry in the OPML file to the <title> element for that feed/URL. If an Atom feed is available, get the value of the <title> element and set the text attribute for that entry in the OPML file to the <title> element for that feed/URL. If the feed is not available, set the text attribute of the entry in the OPML file to the URL value. Each <outline> element should contain the following attributes: type = rss, htmlUrl = URL of the feed, xmlUrl = URL of the feed, text = value of the <title> element within the <channel> element if the feed is in RSS format, or the value of the <title> element if the feed is in Atom format. In addition, create a package.json file for this program.

This version went back to creating elements within the OPML file as single XML elements with all the attributes contained within the element. I tried some further refinements of this prompt, but had some issues with the generated code, so I then began manually iterating on the code generated by the third prompt. I had a WordPress feed which was redirecting to google.com, so I added some error checking if the data read from the feed was undefined. I also did some experimenting with the Blogspot feeds to find the correct HTML element to get the title of the feed and the site URL. Finally, I did an overall cleanup of feed URLs in the input file during my script troubleshooting.

Eventually, I was able to get all the data for the Blogspot feeds read correctly. The remaining Atom feeds were all generated from custom code, so there was too much variation to be able to easily get the title and the site URL from those feeds. I then hand-edited the output OPML file to add the remaining data I wanted.

Lessons learned:

  • It was easy to experiment with different prompts
  • Adding more detailed would refine the code generated by ChatGPT
  • For my app, there was a point of diminishing returns (got harder to specify the desired behavior – but could be due to lack of experience)

I have uploaded the app to this Github repo – give it a try!

Call for Twitter-like systems based on feeds

Dave Winer again calls for “a twitter-like system built with feeds, with all their limits”. In May 2023, I created My Status Tool (Github repo) using Node.js that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies. Colin Walker also created a PHP implementation (Github repo), and our two versions were able to interop. Dave also called for this back in December 2023 (my response), but from what I heard, Dave had some other ideas besides working with MyStatusTool. I don’t think that FeedLand is the system he was talking about, and I don’t think that Blogroll Social is the system either. Anyone interested in working on this?

Can the use of semaphore be useful today?

Ken Smith recently wrote about the use of semaphore and RSS in transmitting information. He relates an experience where he organized students to send a message across a university campus. The historic use of semaphore flags was to communicate between ships. In the 18th century, the “optical telegraph” was developed, and messages could be sent from Amsterdam to Venice in an hour. With the development of the electric telegraph, the use of the optical telegraph fell to the wayside.

Today, people can use RSS readers to monitor posts on websites, and use other social media systems (Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky) to do the same. The rssCloud protocol also provides almost instant notification. I think that the question Ken Smith is asking is “can a group of individuals use this to be able to respond to a crisis“. The answer is “Yes”, but people “would have to be trained to do more than just send or receive a message on the system”.

So – do we choose to do something here? What crisis should we work to avoid?

Not just a blogroll – it’s a feedroll

In mid-March 2024, Dave Winer rolled out a new feature on Scripting News – a blogroll with dynamic content. I think it is interesting, but it is more than a “traditional” blogroll, in that it is not just a list of sites, but is presenting content from those sites, and ordering them in terms of the sites most recently updated at the top of the list. Blogrolls of the past were a static list of sites. In his podcast announcing the rollout, Dave Winer comments that future development directions will be up to users (about 8 minutes into the podcast), as it should be.

Until recently, though, it was unclear how other users would be able to access this feature. However, some one at Automattic developed a WordPress plugin to display the Dave Winer blogroll on a WordPress site. Yesterday, the first new user (Doc Searls) announced that he had the blogroll plugin working on his site.

I think it is great when people are adding features to their sites. I also think it is great that Dave Winer is working to migrate his ideas to other platforms like WordPress, which have a large base of users. The base technology of this feature is based on the FeedLand service, so there is still a linkage between Dave Winer’s tool and deployment of this feature – something for users to keep in mind.

My last observation on this is perhaps a subtle one, but still significant. Following comments from Dave Winer over the years about RSS, and that new format creators should use a different name than RSS, I think there should be a different name for this feature, as it is a significant enhancement from traditional blogrolls. When I looked at Doc Searls’ implementation, I saw that the title of his was “Feedroll”. I think this is a great name for this new feature – let’s use it!