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.

River5 update – the missing feed re-appeared in the Old School Drummers river – go figure! I may still do a fresh install and restart, will continue to monitor this situation.

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?

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.