River5

There are 11 posts filed in River5 (this is page 1 of 2).

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!

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!

Creating A River of News from a Twitter List

I had noticed several people this week posting Twitter lists of people to follow for the Ukraine crisis (journalists/activists/subject matter experts). I know how to follow a Twitter list, but with the Twitter list comes all the other Twitter stuff (sponsored posts, other non-value added things). Since I had the tools available from creating other rivers of news (Old School Drummers, my own reading list and 1999.io bloggers) I followed this process to create a new river of news for following the Ukraine crisis (Politico’s Ukraine Reading List).

  • For each person in the Twitter list, copied their Twitter URL
  • Added an entry in a configuration JSON file (config.json) with the Twitter handle for each person and a RSS feed name based on the Twitter handle
  • Uploaded the config.json file to my instance of tweetsToRss (Node app for creating an RSS feed for a Twitter user timeline)
  • After 10 minutes, checked to see that the tweetsToRss app had created initial RSS feeds
  • After another 10 miniutes, checked to see that my cron job had started copying those RSS feeds to a web hosting location
  • Created a new text file (politicoUkraine.txt) with URLs for all of the RSS feeds, then added that text file to the lists folder in my River5 installation (RSS feed reader)
  • After 10 minutes, checked my River5 console and saw the tab showing those feeds in a River5 file format that I could use for displaying a public river of news
  • Used the files for the Old School Drummers river of news as a base to create the new river of news

If you are interested in more technical details, check out my book Set Up Your Own Platform, which includes a set of chapters on setting up a virtual server and step-by-step details on how to set up the tools to create and manage your own public news rivers.

Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news

Recently, I tried out two tools for creating RSS feeds from Twitter account timelines. My next step was to put this into use for tracking news on a topic. Since I live in the Portland, Oregon area, I thought it would be good to be able to collect Portland protest news from Portland news media, reporters, protest groups, and city/county government into a single easy-to-access source.

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!

 

 

Interesting  news reading workflow from Frank McPherson:

@brentsimmons I use River5 and when I find something I want to read I send it to Radio3 to add it to an RSS feed that is monitored by IFTTT to add to Instapaper. Basically it’s my replacement for Radio Userland. I am nervous about being dependent on Dave to keep Radio3 running.

Want to help creating RSS reading lists for news orgs?

This morning, I saw a tweet from Dave Winer responding to a Emily Bell and Aron Pilhofer thread on making news story data available for public understanding. Dave made the following comment:

Emily, Aron — I’ve followed the other thread. Interesting. Here’s something useful that could help right away. A collection of RSS feeds from news orgs, maintained, with metadata. Something a group of j-school students, maybe even from different unis, could do. 😉

I added this to the thread:

I have a start at this, see http://andysylvester.com/files/reading_lists/…, these lists are used by River5 to power http://fullblastnews.com

Several years ago, I created lists for print media, news networks, video from news networks, and collections on other topics for a demonstration site called FullBlastNews.com. It was meant to show off River4 (at the time) and use of tabs to switch between different news rivers. Some of the navigation is having some problems now, but the rivers still run….

I am publishing my reading lists/rivers lists/RSS lists URL to help jump start this, I am not sure if Aron or Emily or Dave will take any action, but I will be following this conversation to see where it leads.

 

How can we work together on the open web and on software development

I have been in several conversations in the last week (voice and email) where the concept of “working together” in software development came up, and several threads emerged:

  • how the original developer doesn’t/shouldn’t have to do everything – others can contribute (to me, a key concept in open source)
  • how interested/engaged users can be an important force in the direction in which a software application or tool goes forward

Dave Winer has written about this many times:

I have tried to follow that second point in several ways:

I am getting ready to start working in the computer music area again after a long absence, and I am reviewing available tools to see if they fit the areas I am interested in. In that way, I am trying to practice the concepts of working together as I have outlined above.

Anyone want to work together with me? Let me know!