Rivers of News

There are 22 posts filed in Rivers of News (this is page 2 of 3).

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.

Getting started again with rssCloud

Andrew Shell contacted me recently to mention that he has his rssCloud server online – nice! rssCloud uses the <cloud> element in RSS 2.0 to connect a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages. I went through my archives (looks like I last looked at this in 2015 and 2016) and notes, and found that I had a copy of a script (Github Gist link) Dave Winer wrote as a test app in 2015. I uploaded it to my current server, modified it to point to my current domain, and found that it was able to register with the rssCloud server and get updates on the feed listed in the test app – excellent! I plan to review the rssCloud Walkthrough document to guide my next steps.

Resources:

https://gist.github.com/scripting/dbb07695736de85b3882 – Dave Winer test app for Andrew Shell server

https://blog.andrewshell.org/2020-02/18/updating-rsscloud-server/ – Update on rssCloud server

http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ – Running instance of server

https://blog.josephscott.org/2009/09/07/rsscloud-for-wordpress/ – Info on rssCloud plugin for WordPress

https://wordpress.org/plugins/rsscloud/ – Current plugin page for rssCloud WordPress plugin

https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/rsscloud/ – Current SVN repo for rssCloud WordPress plugin

http://home.rsscloud.co/ – New home page for rssCloud info

http://walkthrough.rsscloud.co/ – Implementers Guide to rssCloud

https://github.com/rsscloud/rsscloud-server – rssCloud server source code by Andrew Shell

https://andysylvester.com/2015/11/22/learning-something-new-can-be-hard/ – My 2015 post on rssCloud work

http://notes.andysylvester.com/2016/08/07/exploringRsscloudAndPubsubhubbub.html – My 2016 post on rssCloud work

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!

 

 

Announcing the Media Feed Project

In a recent post, I commented on an idea from Dave Winer on providing a definitive list of RSS feeds for new organizations, and trying to get universities involved. I decided to take some action on my own, and created the Media Feed Project website and Github repo. The content in the OPML files at the Github repo are from my prior work on a news site called FullBlastNews.com. If anyone has RSS feed lists for news organizations, I would be interested in getting a copy. Let me know!

 

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!

A cool River5 trick to update subscription lists

Frank McPherson has created a wiki page on his usage of RSS, which includes River5. One aspect of using River5 is that the default setup is to have subscription lists within the folder where the app resides. On Frank’s wiki page, he gives a tip on how to use an OPML file to refer to another OPML file on a server to update the subscription list. Neat!

Is there a RSS revival going on?

Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz, staff writer for The Atlantic on Internet culture, posted this on Twitter: (UPDATE 12/17/2018: Twitter post was deleted, here are links to Google search cache and offline copy)

Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed?

This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with recommendations for feed reader apps and generally using RSS. I added my own reply for rivers of news.

Next, a post from Cal Newport (saw this via Brad Enslen):

As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.

Wow! This from a person who acknowledges that he does not participate on social networks, but lets it slip that he uses RSS!

Case in point: I’ve never had a social media account, and yet I constantly enjoy connecting to people, and posting and monitoring information using digital networks.

Finally, Brad Enslen has a series of posts dealing with blogging, social media and RSS:

What do you think?