Lazyweb request – does anyone know of other feed readers besides FeedLand and River5 that support the rssCloud protocol? I am trying to collect data regarding the WordPress rssCloud implementation. Thanks.

I have been collaborating with Andrew Shell on the WordPress.com rssCloud issue. Andrew added a note to my support forum post that WordPress.com and the RSS Cloud plugin only accept aggregators running on port 80, 443, and 8080. I have confirmed that the RSS Cloud plugin will accept a registration from an app running on ports 443 and 8080 and provide the correct rssCloud response when the source feed updates. Andrew will be contacting Joseph Scott (plugin developer) at Automattic with this information.

RSS Cloud support in WordPress.com not working

UPDATE: Here is the link to the support forum post I made at WordPress.com

This text is reposted from my test WordPress.com site:

I am doing some testing of the RSS Cloud protocol (http://home.rsscloud.co/) in WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/support/rsscloud/, https://wordpress.com/blog/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/) . I think there is a problem in the implementation, here is my bug report.

What I did:

1. Created a test WordPress.com site ( https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com), checked the feed (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/feed/), made sure that the rssCloud element was present.

2. Subscribed to the site in FeedLand (http://feedland.org/) (best RSS reader for RSS Cloud support)

3. Reviewed Joseph Scott original blog post on rssCloud support in WP and using WP plugin https://blog.josephscott.org/2009/09/07/rsscloud-for-wordpress/

4. Modified my rssCloud test script (https://gist.github.com/andysylvester/d41a6ee6b3a7d0860c039ccbe3c6147f) for Node.js RSS Cloud server (http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/) to access the RSS Cloud setup for my site (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com)

a. var urlRssCloudServer = “https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/?rsscloud=notify“;

b. var urlHackerNews = “https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/feed/

5. Modified function pleaseNotify to display the text of the response from the rssCloud server (my WordPress.com site).

What I saw:

1. Ran the test script (node testscript.js), got the following response:

root@AndyDO-03:~/rssCloudSimple# node rssCloudTestOriginal05.js

testRssCloud v0.40 running on port 2222.

response: == <?xml version=’1.0′?>

<notifyResult success=’false’ msg=’Error testing notification URL : A valid URL was not provided.’ />

.

pleaseNotify: success == undefined, msg == “undefined”

2. Made a post (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/test-post-007/) at 2:18 pm, no response to my test script.

3. Checked in FeedLand for new item, did not see it until 2:28pm (10 minutes later). In testing of other tools creating RSS feeds with rssCloud support, the item would appear in FeedLand within a few seconds. I have noticed that feed readers seem to take up to 30 minutes to detect that there has been a change in a RSS feed from WordPress.com or WordPress.org sites.

What I expected:

1. My script would get a notification that the registration was successful.

2. My script would get a notification from the WordPress.com site when a new post was made.

3. A new post from my WordPress.com site would appear within a few seconds in FeedLand, since I had seen this behavior for other tools creating RSS feeds with rssCloud support

I did some searching on rssCloud problems with WordPress.com/WordPress.org, and found this post from 2009 (http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2009/10/rss-cloud-fail) which described issues with notification URLs:

“Still, we were getting somewhere. There were only two remaining unexplained failures. These were WordPress feeds that were somehow failing to connect to my notification URL. Eventually, after digging through various releases of the WordPress source code, I discovered that these servers were actually running a buggy, older version of the WordPress plugin. Regardless of what the client specified, this version of the plugin would always attempt connections on port 80. “

My app is running on port 2222, the notification URL that the WordPress.com site should be trying to contact is http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com:2222/feedupdated. Could someone shed some light on this? Thanks.

Lazyweb request – I am trying to make sure WordPress is not caching RSS feeds, I tried these things but it did not work. WordPress devs, please get in touch if you have any ideas! I am trying to test a RSS Cloud plugin I developed.

Feedback on my zettelkasten experiment

I have decided to slow down my updates on this project, but I do have a few observations. Adding links to the OPML file was pretty easy in Drummer. I missed adding tags to some links, but will make a sweep of the over the next week. I did some re-arranging of categories, as well as added a lot of categories after the start. In the rendered file, I noticed (as well as a reader) that all the entries are fully expanded. I may experiment with trying to flatten the categories. Also, I have not explored using XSLT style sheets to render the OPML file. Still, my biggest benefit so far is that I am now entering links into the OPML file that I would have pasted in some other file, and they are categorized, which helps in navigation.

My Hugo-based zettelkasten site is lagging in updates. I chose to create a single Markdown file for each entry, and I found that it was a significant amount of typing, even though I was starting with text from the OPML file. My favorite feature of the site is being able to view links by tag. I will continue working to get this caught up with the OPML zettelkasten.

Final note: there are lots of good tools out there, this is what I chose to start with, so far it is working for me!

Demo of rssCloud protocol and reallySimple NPM module 

In this era of moving away from Twitter, I have been reviewing the rssCloud protocol and think about its potential. I had not done anything about it, but saw this Twitter thread and really liked this comment by Preslav Rachev regarding building on RSS: “And best of all, everyone is free to build their own apps and tooling on top of it without restrictions, or stepping onto each other’s toes.”. I then decided to start playing around….

I read through the walkthrough document on the rssCloud site and decided that the simplest test would be to create some RSS feeds that have rssCloud elements, register them with a rssCloud server, then get the server to contact a server when the feeds updated, then display some information from the feeds. I started with this script from Dave Winer, updated it to provide web output, then ran the script twice to register two different feeds. I then made a video of running the script, posting to feeds using Drummer and FeedLand, then displaying the title or description of the most recent item in the feed, along with the feed name. The video is shown below. Source code and more instructions are available on Github. Let me know what you think!

Pooping is the secret to weight loss

I apologize for the crude and crass nature of the title of this post. However, it is an aspect of diets/weight loss programs that I think has been overlooked. I have noticed that when my weight has been somewhat stable, and then I eat a fair amount of fiber (beans, greens, etc), the next day, I usually have a bigger bowel movement than in the past two to three days, and reach a new low in my weight. It seems like it “clears out the backlog”! Thanks for listening, and keep eating that fiber!

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 13

Added over 10 links today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, Blogging, and Writing, and added Agriculture and Directories categories. I reorganized the Podcasting section into Resources and History subsections to group the links better. There are 143 links in the OPML ZK, more than 10 links a day on average – wow! I also updated the Blogging category on my Hugo ZK site, still need to finish migrating the OPML content over. Also on the to-do list – playing with XSLT style sheets to view the OPML content by tags. However, the full ZK file list still looks pretty good.

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 12

Added over 10 links in today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, and added Software Engineering, Programming, and Music categories. I am really working on trying to clear out tabs from my daily browsing by using my ZK, so far I am keeping up!