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!
Rivers of News
There are 22 posts filed in Rivers of News (this is page 1 of 3).
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!
Did some more work on my artcasting site today, figured out how the riverBrowser package renders each item from a River5 river file, added a new utility function to riverbrowser.js to get the enclosure URL and create HTML to display the picture – looks good!
Decided to shift my artcasting focus to creating a river of art (think River of News or the current “news product” feature in FeedLand). I created a new River5 river file and have the first cut displaying at artcasting.andysylvester.com – still need to modify the riverBrowser toolkit to display the images.
It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…
In the spirit of federation and the lack of need to review posts for standards (unlike this instance of editorial discretion), I present two new newsriver apps for collecting FeedLand user feeds and Mastodon user feeds that I am interested in. By the way, I decided to take feeds from two other products as an input to my products, and RSS said “yes!“
Had a great conversation with Ron Chester this week (long time 1999.io blogger on Thailand and ham radio topics and also on micro.blog). Ron is a great follower of Bob Dylan and ham radio, and I have set up two news rivers for Dylan and ham radio topics. Ron has a bunch of new low power rigs that he is going to try out in the new year…
Back in July 2022, Dave Winer said he never suggested people should run their own web server. However, in the last week, he tweeted a link to this post from 2015 where he says “If you’re a journalism educator, please make sure every new journalist you graduate has the ability to run a server, install blogging and river software”. Just saying…let’s be consistent…
Troubleshooting Brave mobile browser problem
When my main site got switched to https, I had some problems with sub-domain sites. One of them was my Old School Drummers river of news site. I cleaned up some http/https references, and got it to appear on desktop and mobile, but the mobile version did not show the text. I used Developer Tools in Brave and cleared up what I think is the remaining issues, but it still does not display in the Brave mobile browser for Android (that is, news items do not appear). It does work in Google Chrome for mobile. Lazyweb – any thoughts?