When you click on the document icon you get a new page with the full text of the item. Some feeds have the full text of articles, so this makes it possible to read them. I wouldn't necessarily rely on the URL as being persistent.#
The </> icon shows you all the information we have associated with the item. It's like View Source -- esp useful if you write software that works with these objects. #
This fix applies to all news products for every FeedLand user. #
Sometime next week we'll start testing the open source release of the FeedLand server. Looking for people with experience running a WordPress server, or equivalent. It should be that level of complexity. I want to smooth out the experience, before releasing it publicly. If you're interested in participating, please send me an email. #
The Add a few feeds command in the Tools menu, and the one that happens automatically when a new user is onboarded (same code of course) has been changed.#
Previously it would stop when it failed to subscribe to a feed.#
Now it continues. It logs the error to the JavaScript console, so if anyone asks about this (It says it was finished after subscribing to 37 of 84 feeds), ask them to look in the console to see if there are any errors.#
Why? It's a pain when there are 10 bad feeds in a list of 400 scattered randomly through the list.#
And you're not always able to edit the list, so there's that problem too.#
You don't need to be signed on to use the command, however, if you're signed on, there are checkboxes so you can see which feeds you're subscribed to and you can see the categories you've assigned them to. #
There's an entry box at the top of the search page that allows you to search for more terms. #
The results can be sorted by title, how recently they've updated, and the number of people subscribing to the feed. #
You can get more details about the feed by clicking on its title, and view the five most recent items by clicking on the grey wedge to the left of the title. #
I have been working with Andrew Shell to debug the rssCloud implementation in FeedLand.#
I was missing a piece of the protocol and that was preventing us from working with WordPress with their rssCloud capability. #
It now appears to work. I had good code in River5 to copy, and that made it a snap. #
This will be a substantial performance boost for WordPress-hosted sites. Updates should now arrive at feedland.org in a second, whereas before it might take an hour to get into the database via polling.#
There's a new command in the first menu, Read user feeds. #
It opens a new page that combines the features of two previous pages (that are still there). At the top of the page is an edit box where you can post and edit items from your feed. And below that is a list of posts from all the user feeds.#
When you post a new item you will see it enter at the top of the list.#
You can click on one of your own posts to edit it. Obviously clicking on someone else's post does nothing.#
New features always have bugs! And this one is no exception. But it's a very interesting combination of features. Sort of like a mini-Twitter based entirely on RSS#
When you go to that page you will see a reverse-chronologic list of posts to people's personal feeds here on FeedLand.#
Not much there yet, probably because for everyone, including myself, they've sort of been there without anyone knowing what to do with them.#
The rules of decorum apply here. There will be ways to block people, that's inevitable. Feel free to discuss the product. Do not get personal, do not give anyone orders. Remember we're here to have fun and make something new!#
Now you get the title and description for the story and the image is blank instead of a screen shot of FeedLand. There is a way to get rid of the image altogether but it's going to take some work. #
Update: The work is done. Here's a Twitter thread that demos. #
You can now optionally post links to Mastodon in addition to RSS, Twitter, Slack and the linkblog page Radio3 maintains for you.#
The instructions are here. If you have questions or problems, you can post a note on the new Mastodon server we set up for this use. Remember to say what you did, what you expected to happen, what actually happened. Screen shots can be helpful. Look in the JavaScript console for any errors. #
PS: I chose Radio3 as the first app to hook up to Mastodon because it's the simplest. #
I'm working with a number of other devs on getting basic communication with Mastodon working, exactly analogous to what we have had with Twitter since 2014.#
If you're a server-level developer and want to help test this stuff, here's where you go. #
Not sure what will be the first user-visible feature to come from this, but this is basic stuff we have to have, for pretty much everything. #
And after a few days of slogging through some pretty scanty docs, it's finally starting to be fun. 😄#
There was a deep problem in the connection between Radio3 and FeedLand, caused by me working around a bug in a package that the reallySimple package used. . #
The problem could be solved by making the string we use as a "guid" for items in a feed to be slightly different from the one used for the link element and still have it serve as a permalink. I did that by adding a nonsense attribute to the URL for the permalink. Hopefully all the servers will ignore the field they aren't looking for. #
Sorry if this sounds incomprehensible. I'm leaving this detailed a note so if I ever stumble across this area of the code someday I'll have some clue as to wtf is going on.#
Anyway as egregious as this is, it appears to work, and the links are once again showing up on items from Radio3 feeds. #
One of the most innovative features in FeedLand is the ability to read the contents of a feed from the list of feeds you're subscribed to.#
If you view the list according to when the feed last updated, it's an amazing like of blog, but with all the feeds you subscribe to participating.#
Now there was an issue with this feature -- if you didn't reload the page frequently, it wouldn't find the newest items of feeds you had already expanded.#
Thanks to Joseph Zitt for reporting this. I think I was able to fix the problem, so that you can get fresh news every time you expand a feed, even if you don't reload the page. #
With all the new users this has become a pretty expensive thing to build, and it was being built on every page view, even for people who aren't logged in. #
So I removed the sub-menu. Hopefully it will be able to come back in some other form in the future, or perhaps as a separate app. #
While I was there I also removed the link to the Recent users page. There's already a link for that in the first menu. I imagine it might be referenced in the docs now, if anyone wants to have a look that would be helpful. #
The document icon, when you click it, shows you the content of the post in its own page. Example. You can use this to share a link to any story outside of FeedLand. I've wanted this for example, when I want to share a specific podcast episode, and there was no way to do it. Now there is.#
The code icon pops up a dialog with the data behind the item. Screen shot. This is vital for debugging and sometimes error reporting. In addition to opening a dialog, it also displays the data in the JavaScript console in the browser. #
The standalone pages aren't quite finiished yet, esp the ones for posts without titles.#
When you choose it, a new page opens with an edit box at the top. Type something into the box and click the Post button. A new river opens beneath the box with the new post in it. #
You can edit the post. Click on the text in the river, and it goes into the edit box. Make your changes and click the Update button.#
If you look at the feed (click the Feed link at the top of the river, screen shot) you'll see that the text is saved in the feed in Markdown. Even though the editor is wizzy it's really a Markdown editor. Try selecting some text, pressing Cmd-B to bold the text and update. Look at the feed. You'll see that it's saved in Markdown. We can talk later about why this is important. #
You can change the title and description of your feed. Choose Settings from the system menu at the right edge of the screen. Click on the Feed tab.#
If you have questions, post them here. It'll help me write the docs. 😄#
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)