- Here's a screen shot from news.scripting.com that shows two icons on a news item. They work now, they didn't used to.#
- What the icons do#
- 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. #
- Good morning!#
- We've started testing the open source release of FeedLand's server. #
- Who it's for#
- We're 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, dave.winer@gmail.com, please include your GitHub user account. #
- Requirements#
- A server with Node.js installed.#
- Access to MySQL either on the local machine or as a service running elsewhere.#
- An SMTP mail sender or an Amazon SES account to send email for authentication.#
- Amazon S3 for optional features.#
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.#
- I introduced a problem in FeedLand when keyboard navigation in the Feed List feature was added. #
- Basically, if you had a Feed List displayed, an "ask dialog" wouldn't receive your keystrokes, or it would appear to freeze. #
- This dialog appears whenever FeedLand asks for a string, for example to enter a string to search for, or to enter the URL of a feed to subscribe to. #
- I believe I found the problem and fixed it. #
- It's explained here. #
- Documented on the Extras page, and a place to ask questions here. #
- Now there's a cursor that goes up and down through a feed list. #
- When you press Return the feed expands revealing the five most recent items in the feed.#
- It's a toggle so pressing Return again collapses it.#
- You can quickly move through the list expanding and collapsing feeds. #
- Here's a quick video demo.#
- Thanks to Frank McPherson for the suggestion! :-)#
- PS: You don't need to log in to use this feature.#
- A new FeedLand feature -- you can now search titles of feeds. #
- To start a search, choose Search feeds from the first menu. #
- A dialog appears asking what you want to search for. Enter a string, and you're taken to a page with the search results. #
- Here are a few example searches you can try.#
- http://feedland.org/?search=blog#
- http://feedland.org/?search=nyt#
- http://feedland.org/?search=bbc#
- http://feedland.org/?search=feedland#
- http://feedland.org/?search=scott#
- http://feedland.org/?search=ken#
- http://feedland.org/?search=feed#
- http://feedland.org/?search=dave#
- http://feedland.org/?search=john#
- http://feedland.org/?search=rss#
- 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. #
- Here's a place for comments and questions. #
- 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.#
- Here's how to use it..#
- Navigate to the page you want to view when you go to feedland.org.#
- Choose Set start page from the Tools menu.#
- Confirm that you want to set this as your start page.#
- That's it.#
- Test it this way..#
- Start a new browser tab and enter http://feedland.org/#
- It should take you to the page you chose in the previous section.#
- 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#
- Dear friends --#
- Here's a new feature that should be interesting.#
- http://feedland.org/?userfeedsnews=true#
- 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!#
- Feeds rule. :-)#
- A few weeks ago I added a feature I called "story pages" -- implemented through the document icon under a river item.#
- If you want to read a whole story on it's own page, you can click the link.#
- Now if you took that link and posted it to Facebook or Twitter, you'd get a description for FeedLand the app. Not acceptable.#
- It took a while but I figured out how to make it so just those pages have metadata for the story you're viewing, not FeedLand.#
- For example, try pasting this URL into Twitter.#
- http://feedland.org/?item=738430feedland.org#
- 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. #
- Two FeedLand-relevant posts today on Scripting News.#
- 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. #
- Here's the first item I posted to Mastodon using Radio3.#
- It's not ready to release yet, it still requires a user interface for configuring it with a specific Mastodon server. #
- But for now, every link I post through Radio3 will go through Twitter, RSS, the Linkx page on Scripting News and Mastodon. #
- I chose Radio3 to start with because it was the simplest app to hook up to Masto.#
- 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. #
- Still diggin!#
- 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. #
- I'm working on the style for the individual item pages. #
- There are two types -- singular items (no titles) and titled items. The layout needs of each are not very different. #
- Here's an example of a singular item page and a titled item page. #
- Screen shots in this thread on github. #
- 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.#
- Previously the new per-user feeds didn't have a channel-level link element. They do now. #
- This means that when you're viewing the Feed Info page for the feed and you click on its name you don't hit a broken link.#
- BTW, if you may have to make a change to your feed, edit one of the items or post something new, to get this feature. #
- That in general is true of all feeds we generate, because they are not built dynamically, they are only rebuilt when you odd or change something. #
- We've had the feeds you add to by Liking things, now here's another kind of feed you create -- by writing. #
- The feature is ready for you to try out.#
- If you look in the first Menu, there's a new command. Edit my feed. #
#- 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. 😄#
- The app can now read an OPML subscription list from the local file system or from the web. #
- The resulting file is saved in the app's data sub-folder, configurable.#
- You can now call it from the command line. #
- Eventually this might turn into an app that can go head and add the feeds to the database. #
- Open source, available on GitHub.#