Feeds

There are 117 posts filed in Feeds (this is page 4 of 12).

Taking steps to build a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that my vision of a feed-based social network included the use of rssCloud as the notification system within RSS feeds. Back in 2022, I did some investigation regarding support of the rssCloud protocol in WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and using FeedLand as the most prominent feed reader supporting the rssCloud protocol. It turned out that although WordPress.com sites had included support for rssCloud since 2009, and WordPress.org sites through the use of the RSS Cloud WordPress plugin, there was some misunderstanding about what a client needed to do to register with the WordPress rssCloud support. This Github gist goes into the details, but to summarize, the client trying to register with WordPress needs to be running on port 80 or 443 to be recognized. Both Feedland and the River5 feed reader (the two prominent feed readers supporting rssCloud notification) did not necessarily run on those ports, and as a result the “real-time” notification of rssCloud did not occur. Those feed readers were able to read the WordPress RSS feed and display updates, but not in real-time.

FeedLand was updated and now supports WordPress rssCloud registration. As part of that effort, Dave Winer created a rssCloud server demo project to use to check rssCloud server implementations. I decided to check this out with a WordPress.com site and a WordPress.org site using the RSS Cloud plugin. On my server, I am using the Caddy web server, and had some subdomains being hosted through Caddy. I updated the rssCloud demo code to use the port I am running on, and to use one of those subdomains with Caddy doing a reverse proxy so that the app would appear to be running on port 80. My test was successful! I was able to see the app register with both the WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and to see the app respond when the sites notified the app of a new post. Here is my copy of the main app and the stats file created by the app.

This is an important step in creating the feed-based social network I have in mind. WordPress is the largest generator of RSS feeds supporting rssCloud, so it is important to understand how the WordPress rssCloud implementation works to make sure that apps interacting in this social network can get real-time updates from WordPress sites.

Dave Winer has created a new Bluesky account for political news, and is planning to create a “river of news” site for feeds (placeholder here). Dave has other news rivers (as well as my news rivers for general feeds and WordLand users), so nothing new here in terms of technology but good to get more rivers out there. I applaud any effort to “own your social net“.

UPDATE 3/31/2025: Dave Winer changed the URLs for the Bluesky account and the placeholder site (see reference)

What should a social network have?

I am cross-posting this from my WordLand blog.

The mention of a social network built around RSS has come up again. I added my off-the-cuff thoughts on this topic in this post, but I also wanted to review Dave Winer’s description on the rssCloud website:

There are three sides to the cloud:#

  • The authoring tool. I edit and update a feed. It contains a element that says how a subscriber should request to notification of updates.#
  • The cloud. It is notified of an update, and then in turn notifies all subscribers.#
  • The subscriber. A feed reader, aggregator, whatever — that subscribes to feeds that may or may not be part of a cloud. #

I think that these three elements are the minimum features for a social network to exist. By breaking this down into three parts, it is easier to see that multiple applications cane be created or assembled to create a social network. It does not have to be an “all-in-one” application (like Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). Users can use whatever tool they want to create their content, and they can use whatever tool they want to consume the content. Finally, both of those tools can interact with a “cloud server” which performs notification. 

So why has this idea/concept not gained traction? I think there are several reasons. Many authoring tools create feeds, but do not support notification. Many subscriber apps read feeds, but on more of a “polling” basis, and not because the app has been notified that a feed has updated. To me, these are places where innovation could start.

I have been waiting for “someone else” to do this work, but “no one” has stepped in to start, so I am going to try adding some “notification” features to some other blogging tools. I would be remiss if I did not point out that there is a RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress blogs, and WordPress.com supports rssCloud. In my experience, though, my self-hosted WordPress blog has not experienced “real-time” performance due to caching of the RSS feed by my host, Bluehost. I have tried many ways to turn this off, with no success.  Anyway, there is nothing “stopping” me from innovating here, so here goes!

Announcing WordLand Bloggers River of News

I am a firm believer in the “river of news” way of reading RSS feeds. Dave Winer has created several “river of news” RSS aggregators (the latest is River5, available on Github). As part of this effort, Dave also created some tools for display of a river of news in a single-page application, using the output from River5. I have created one of these river applications (WordLand Bloggers River of News) to keep up with the WordLand user blogs. If you want to have your WordLand blog added to the river, email me at sylvester.andy@gmail.com. Let’s keep blogging!

A short review of the Huffduffer podcast feed service

Recently, I posted some ideas about podcast subscription lists/listening lists, and one of my readers (John Johnston) suggested I look at the Huffduffer podcast feed service. I found out that I already had an account – amazing! Must have forgotten!

I tried it this evening. After I logged in, I clicked on the “Huffduff it!” button at the top of the page. This took me to another page which had text boxes for the audio URL, title, description, and tags. I filled in the fields and saw a file added to the previous file that I had “huffduffed”. I then took the feed URL, and was able to subscribe to it to PocketCasts, and to listen to one of the files. Bing!

This service provides the basic functionality of creating a feed from audio files, and also hosts the feed, so the user does not have to provide any hosting. Nice! In the next few days, I will review some other services that I discovered after Huffduffer. Many thanks to John Johnston for mentioning the Huffduffer service.

Musing about podcast subscription/listening lists

What is a podcast subscription/listening list? Well, let’s start with talking about subscription lists. For most, if not all podcast clients, OPML files containing a list of the podcast feeds being monitored have been the defacto standard for import/export of podcast feed lists. Prior to use in podcast clients, OPML files have been used as a defacto standard for import/export of feed lists for feed aggregator apps.

As far back as 2012, Dave Winer was pushing for the use of OPML subscription lists within podcast apps. In this context, he wanted podcast apps to be able to subscribe to an OPML file with a URL, so that people could automatically get any updates to the OPML, and subsequently, anything new would be added to their podcast app.

In the fall of 2024, Dave Winer brought up this idea several times and later created a page describing this idea in more detail, and calling it “listening lists”. Dave Winer created a Github issue to collect feedback on this idea, and Dom Christie suggested the following:

I have been wondering if the episodes from curated lists could be published in their own RSS feed? That way, users (and not just podcasters) could created their own feeds, listenable in any app.

That same day, Dave Winer linked to a page describing a RSS feed made up of first episodes of fiction podcasts. An overview page lists the podcast episodes and also provides audio players for them – neat! From the looks of it, this is a made-by-hand page, although there could be some tool or tooling involved.

This suggests several ideas to me:

  • App to create a podcast feed which merges a list of other podcast feeds
  • App to allow users to create a podcast feed of podcast episodes that they select (it could include the ability to host the created feed)

I did some experiments over the holidays with Dave Winer’s RSS NPM module to create a podcast feed of some audio files that were not organized as a podcast. However, the experiment shows how this type of feed can be created. I am going to start working on this concept. If anyone reading this is interested in collaborating, let me know!

Followup on creating WordPress podcast feeds

In November 2024, I wrote a post about an issue I discovered in trying to create a WordPress category feed for a set of audio posts. The category feed had issues in being recognized by a podcast app. I found that when I set the post type/format as “Audio” in the WordPress editor, the category feed could be recognized by a podcast app.

Last month, I noticed a tweet by Ken Smith that some WordPress themes do not have the support in the editor interface for the post type/format. He linked to a video (shown at the end of this post) showing how to modify WordPress files to add this feature to a theme if not present. I checked some of my older WordPress websites, and found that several of them had this issue. I appreciate Ken bringing this to a wider attention.