Feeds

There are 115 posts filed in Feeds (this is page 8 of 12).

Amazing! The website for the Oregonian (the main newspaper for Portland, Oregon) now has a RSS feed! There has not been any feeds for this site in years – glad to see there is at least one feed now…

Anyone losing feeds in River5?

During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith’s Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith’s feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken’s feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!

More on Twitter API death watch – saw this post by Ryan Barrett (developer of Bridgy federation tool)(check out Bridgy for Mastodon!) where he references a Twitter Community post that April 29th is the final date for original Twitter API support. Oops! Guess I misread that…. my app is still working, even if WordPress.com is not!

Demo of MyStatusTool – Twitter using RSS and rssCloud

I have created a proof of concept for a microblogging tool relying on RSS for data storage and rssCloud for notification. I was motivated to do this to show how rssCloud could be used to support a Twitter-like experience. Also, I was blocked for posting an innocuous comment on the FeedLand user feed tool, and felt that there needed to be an alternative to that tool for microblog posting. My earlier posts on the development of this tool are here and here.

In this demo app, the basic functions are:

  • Ability to make a short post
  • When a post is made, a RSS feed is updated, a separate page for the post is created, and the post appears on the home page via Websockets
  • The tool provides hosting for the RSS feed and posts created
  • The tool can display updates to any RSS feeds that support the rssCloud protocol via Websockets (feeds are listed in a configuration file)
  • The contents of the feeds in the configuration file are displayed when the user accesses the page (so they can see what has been posted recently), then any posts with the tool appear at the top of the page

The tool is set up for a single user and requires some configuration. Please consult the README on the Github repo for more information if you want to set up the tool for yourself.

The demo app is available at http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com:443/. The contents of the feeds in the configuration file are displayed, along with any recent posts using the demo app. I encourage people to try making posts and see how they appear and how quickly they appear. As posts continue, so will display of updates to the RSS feeds in the configuration file.

This is a proof of concept, but will be further developed. If you find problems in the tool, or want to suggest features, feel free to create an issue in the Github repo. Also, I would love it if a few other people try installing it and let me know how it goes…

This weekend, I learned that Mastodon provides at least two types of feeds, your toots (Your feed URL is [instance]/users/[username].rss or .atom, for example https://mastodon.social/users/brownpau.rss), and your toots with replies (https://zirk.us/@bsigmon/with_replies.rss). In addition, there is a service called OpenRSS which can also generate RSS feeds for different Mastodon activity.