<p>I added <ahref="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/xsl/style.xsl">an XSLT stylesheet</a> to this RSS feed! This means that when you open this feed in a web browser that does not support subscribing to RSS feeds, you will instead get a nice looking page without me ever writing actual raw HTML. In older or less common web browsers that still support RSS subscriptions (as every good web browser should), such as Pale Moon, you will still get the default page that asks you if you want to subscribe.</p>
<p>Some of my friends had mentioned adding RSS to their static site generators was hard; how about turning your index page into the RSS feed, and letting browsers generate the HTML for you?</p>
A blog from a friend on the fediverse with a rather low post frequency, but that often presents the issues of technology, of capitalism, or just of having a life using unusual approaches, often full of metaphors.
All the topic changes on an IRC channel hosted on tilde.town's internal IRC server, in which we roleplay being in a Java-related hot tub.
The channel has <ahref="http://tilde.town/wiki/socializing/irc/channels/javapool.html"target="_blank">a town wiki page</a> if you want to learn about the lore.
<p>I think I found this blog through tilde.news or lobste.rs, but I couldn't really find the source. I can't find out much about the blog's creator, other than them being a prominent SCP writer.</p>
<p>This feed indeed has some interesting things, related to SCP, sci-fi (especially time traveling), or programming. I bookmarked the <ahref="https://qntm.org/perl_en">Perl introduction</a>, if I ever want to learn Perl and scare my fellow Python developers at work.</p>
<p>I have been trying to avoid using Firefox and prefer Pale Moon as much as I can, in preparation for the rather pessimistic outcomes I see with <ahref="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firefox-maker-mozilla-lays-off-250-workers-says-covid-19-lowered-revenue/">the current management at Mozilla</a>. It works pretty well for most of my uses, although I sometimes have to fallback to Firefox when I need to use websites that rely heavily on JS and do not use compilator options that would enhance compatibility, like Imgur and GitHub. Using Pale Moon on a 11+ years old ThinkPad X201 Tablet also really shows how resource hungry the Web is.</p>
<p>Some of my favorite things with Pale Moon include <ahref="https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/moonscape/">turning it into Netscape</a>, <ahref="https://www.palemoon.org/sync/">sync support</a>, and built-in RSS preview and subscription support via Live Bookmarks. I however have an issue with the RSS preview: it allows you to subscribe not only via Live Feeds but also with other desktop applications that you might have installed, such as Thunderbird, or Yahoo. My issue is that I wanted to add a button to quickly subscribe on envs.net's TinyTinyRSS instance, and after various attempts I could not add it in the user interface.</p>
<p>Here comes the trusty <code>about:config</code> to the rescue! Looking up <code>yahoo</code> in the configuration values pointed me to two keys in the configuration:</p>
<dl>
<dt>browser.contentHandlers.types.0.title</dt>
<dd>Initially set to <em>My Yahoo!</em>, I changed it to <em>TinyTinyRSS</em>.</dd>
<dd>Initially set to <code>https://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=%s</code>, I changed it to <code>https://rss.envs.net/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s</code>. I found this URL by looking at the bookmarklets configuration in TinyTinyRSS and reading the short JS code that redirects you to TinyTinyRSS.</dd>
<p>I initially tried to add a button next to the <em>My Yahoo!</em> one by creating two new keys, <code>.types.1.title</code> and <code>.types.1.uri</code>, but that failed. I did not yet look into the Pale Moon source code to see why this could have failed.</p>
<p>With this change, instead of Yahoo, I can quickly subscribe to anyone's RSS feeds faster than ever. This will definitely not help my backlog of 2600+ articles…</p>
<p>While writing the previous post about TinyTinyRSS in Pale Moon, I tried to fix an issue I still had with my XSLT: To make HTML tags in <description> blocks work, I had to break an important part of the RSS specification and add tags directly without escaping them. XSLT stylesheets would decode entities or CDATA blocks, and do not provide a function to selectively re-parse XML tags, so I felt I was stuck. I then found out that this bit of code could get me to output the content of a description tag without getting HTML entities, so getting raw HTML as I want it without causing bugs with Pale Moon's RSS preview or bad RSS validator warnings:</p>
<p><code>disable-output-escaping</code><ahref="https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116#disable-output-escaping">is optional</a> according to the W3C specification since version 1. libxslt, Chromium and Internet Explorer do support it, but Firefox <ahref="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcessor/XSL_Transformations_in_Mozilla_FAQ#can_i_do_disable-output-escaping.3f">chose not to</a>, and <ahref="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168"target="_blank">a Bugzilla ticket</a> for it will celebrate its 20th birthday this year. They do say themselves that this causes issues for RSS support, so I chose to just not care about it. If you are a Firefox user and are seeing raw, unparsed HTML tags in there, I can only suggest using another browser, or just subscribing to this feed and reading this in its home, a RSS aggregator.</p>
A blog from a kind friend of mine that has been running for nearly 18 years, mostly covering electronics and software along with books and personal things. I don't know much about electronics but it is fascinating for me to see things being done with that anyway.
<p>I added <ahref="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/xsl/opml.xsl">yet another XSLT stylesheet</a> and there is now an OPML subscriptions file available if you are feeling lazy and want to add all the feeds I talk about here. It is built by hand using a Makefile—I need to remember to run it on every new feed…</p>
<description>An RSS feed from a tilde friend that I randomly stumbled upon a few weeks ago, probably on IRC or Mastodon. If you feel like you need some cute sandcat breaks in the middle of your tons of blogs in your feed reader, well there you have it!</description>
I was looking at directories of RSS feeds because I wanted to find more original feeds that I might not find easily from just browsing my friends' blogs or the rest of my small corner of the internet, then I found a few pages that listed directories of RSS feeds, so I made a directory of those directories of RSS feed directories as an OPML file. Those aren't either OPML or RSS files so they use the <code>link</code> outline type which you will probably not be able to use unless you have an <ahref="http://outliners.scripting.com/"target="_blank">outline editor</a>.
]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>BBC Weather</title>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2021 08:15:59 +0000</pubDate>
<p>While I was looking for unusual RSS feeds, I stumbled upon a way to get weather RSS feeds from the <ahref="https://bbc.com/weather"target="_blank">BBC Weather</a> service. If you open the page for a location, you will get a URL in this format:</p>
This is one of my earliest attempts at a PSP-compatible RSS feed: a feed for the <code>#fridaypostcard</code> tradition on tilde.town's IRC channel, where every Friday you can post a link to an image with this tag and a cron job picks it up. This feed does not keep track of any history at all and is cleared on every Friday. Despite my attempts, most of the images in this feed cannot be displayed on a PSP. Most image links use Imgur, which requires HTTPS, and the PSP's RSS reader does not support HTTPS at all.
]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>WordPress feeds</title>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:54:11 +0000</pubDate>
<p>WordPress sites natively have support for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds, and they have some docs to help you find them. Even if the website does not advertise them, you can try adding some URL parameters or changing some paths:</p>
<p>Replace <code>rss2</code> with <code>atom</code> for an Atom feed, and with <code>rdf</code> for an RSS 1.0 feed.</p>
<p>I added a distinction between RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 in <ahref="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/"target="_blank">ITSB</a> and used it to provide more official feeds from the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Marine Services and Merchant Shipping Inspection and Investigation Division and the mongolian Air Accidents Investigation Bureau.</p>
<p>On <ahref="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/"target="_blank">Project Gemini</a>, a protocol in-between HTTP and Gopher, a new community has developed and a lot of original content is being published, relative to Gopher at least. The project sparked renewed interest in those almost-text-only protocols, sometimes offered as alternatives to the web.</p>
<p>Most people just make blogs on there, called gemlogs. Those gemlogs are frequently practicing a habit that has been disappearing from blogs faster than the blogs themselves disappeared in favor of social media: posts that reply to other people's posts.</p>
<p>I like email as a discussion method because it works like letters, just with some faster delivery and cheaper postage cost; no typing notifications and no expectations of a very fast reply like on instant messaging platforms, so you have less anxiety and more time to write out your thoughts. the UI of most email clients encourage you to write more, to not just send one line; the text length limit probably exists due to technical limitations, but you wouldn't be able to reach it without writing book after book in a single email. twitter is probably the worst place to debate on, since having much less space to explain yourself means your thoughts immediately get misinterpreted.</p>
<p>Replying to other people's posts on your own blog or gemlog is basically like e-mail, but the discussion can be read by a lot more people. you get all the benefits of long-form writing and asynchronous communication, combined with sharing with or receiving knowledge from your readers and other people's readers. However, you can hit an issue where the person who posted the text you replied to might be completely unaware of your reply, and might never read it, unlike email. some standards exist to help with this, such as <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention"target="_blank">Webmentions</a>, or the <ahref="https://www.rssboard.org/trackback"target="_blank">trackback namespace</a> for RSS.</p>
<p>I will let you click the link to read more about trackback; because I am posting today to show you an alternative, if you want to use something that approximatively nothing supports: <ahref="http://web.archive.org/web/20090129072752/http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/annotation/"target="_blank">mod_annotation</a>, a proposed RSS 1.0 module. This, like most RSS 1.0 modules, never reached a status of standard module and disappeared from the Internet, so the only way to find them now is to use the Wayback Machine. I love the Wayback Machine.</p>
<p>To use this module, first add a new XML namespace to your feed: <code>xmlns:annotate="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/annotate/"</code>. Then, in the <code><item></code> tag, add the following tag to reference something else:</p>
<p>This module was only proposed for RSS 1.0, but most feed readers barely make any distinction between RSS 1.0 and 2.0, so if a feed reader ever supported this module, you could probably use it safely in RSS 2.0 too.</p>
<p>A continuation of yesterday's post on replies in RSS feeds, due to a simple question: how about Atom?</p>
<p>Turns out <ahref="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685"target="_blank">RFC 4685</a> defines an XML namespace one can use to define replies. It is rather similar to yesterday's mod_annotation.</p>
<p>To use this namespace, you will need to first add the namespace to your feed: <code>xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0"</code>. You then have access to two new elements and two new attributes, and the spec also defines a new <code>rel</code> value:</p>
<ul>
<li><code><thr:in-reply-to></code> to indicate what you are replying to using the ID indicated in the <code><id></code> tag;</li>
<li><code><link rel="replies"></code> to point to a page where some, or all, known replies to a post are listed;</li>
<li><code>thr:updated</code> to add on the above link the last date when the page was updated;</li>
<li><code>thr:count</code> to add on the above link the number of known replies listed in the linked page;</li>
<li><code><thr:total></code> to indicate the <strong>total</strong> number of known replies, as the linked replies pages might only contain a portion of them.</li>
<p>None of those are required. You can repeat the <code><link rel="replies" /></code> as many times as you might need, if you have multiple pages. The metadata given by the <code><thr:total></code> element and the <code>thr:count</code> and <code>thr:updated</code> attributes is non-authoritative, which means it does not have to be exact.</p>
<p>If you are using <code><thr:in-reply-to></code>, it is recommended to also include the post's link in a <code><link rel="related"></code> to allow a graceful fallback for feed readers that might not support the threading extensions.</p>
<p><ahref="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685"target="_blank">The RFC</a> includes a bunch of examples that should be enough to get you started should you ever want to try using this namespace.</p>
<p>Before I start writing posts on threading for just every single syndication format, here is some info for two formats I have experimented with in <ahref="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/"target="_blank">ITSB</a>:</p>
<p><ahref="https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1"target="_blank">JSON Feed</a> does not have support for threading in its spec, but you could just make your own extension for that. It does not use JSON-LD either, which would have allowed for a similar extension system as XML; but after experiencing the complexity of JSON-LD first hand at my day job and facing the numerous interoperability issues that causes, I can definitely understand that they wouldn't want to.</p>
<p><ahref="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/internet-explorer/ie-developer/platform-apis/aa768139(v=vs.85)"target="_blank">Channel Definition Format</a> allows for nested channels, so you could at least create a structured representation of a thread as a tree if you, the original author of the post, knew about all the replies. You cannot, however, specify that you are replying to something yourself. The format does support XML namespace extensions, so you could use <code>thr</code> or mod_annotation.</p>
<p>I am always fascinated when I somehow manage to learn a bit about the early days of the Internet in South East Asia. At a time when Unicode barely even existed, when non-Latin alphabet support was just relying on a ton of hacks, a lot of interesting things happened.</p>
<p>I recently translated some Japanese specifications I found on the Wayback Machine for two obsolete syndication formats. I first had to determine which encoding the specifications were using, because Google Translate was really unhappy with that; I had to convert from Shift-JIS to UTF-16 then to UTF-8, and from EUC-JP to UTF-8. I am using Google Translate because I know absolutely nothing about Japanese; I just take the messy "English" translation and turn it into comprehensible English.</p>
<p>I first translated <ahref="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/hina/"target="_blank">HINA</a>, a format that relies on RFC 822 message headers and was designed for Asahina-Antenna. It appears that in Japan, feed readers were called "antennas". This format is apparently still served by some websites according to a quick online search; I will look into that later, just as I will look into those antennas.</p>
<p>Today, I translated <ahref="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/lirs/"target="_blank">LIRS</a>, a format that uses a gzipped simili-CSV to report the same thing.</p>
<p>These two formats do not have item descriptions or optional URLs; they are only meant to report changes on external content. They already take into account the notion of feed aggregation. HINA even has image-related data for photo galleries.</p>
<p>It is pretty hard to trace those formats, first because of the rather obvious language barrier I am facing, and second because the Wayback Machine did not always catch everything, so there are many dead links. Of course, everything is completely dead today. I am however going to keep looking into those formats, and they will soon be implemented in <ahref="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/"target="_blank">ITSB</a> just for the sake of keeping them alive.</p>
Quite the classic feed here, but the only criteria for me to feature a feed on here is that it exists, because I want to see both more feed producers and consumers. If you have no idea what XKCD is, well, you are probably missing out on a lot of developer jokes.
<description>A friend of a friend, with a nice-looking website. Their site has some random zines and articles on various topics. Not updated that often, but that's okay, that's a smol personal website and that's the kind of websites I want to see more often.</description>
While browsing the blog to learn a bit more and have something to say here, I found something that is worth posting there; its forum had a weird French translation, displaying "Il y a 3 ans later" (Three years ago later). Unfortunately, from past experience, I know they tend to filter submissions rather hard, so it did not make it to their articles.
<description>Unfortunately not as active as it used to be. This Tumblr blog shares strange, usually funny, pictures found in Google Street View.</description>
<description>This is the RSS feed of my own French blog. I often post about various technical shenanginans that you won't see in my other sites, as well as other non-technical content that I don't put anywhere else either.</description>
<description>A good friend that I share a passion for the 16-bit Windows era with. This particular feed is a web version of their Secure Scuttlebutt logs, and although it has not been updated for a while, I still want to share it because I really dig the design of that website. The images use 216 colors, aka the netscape-compatible color palette, which inspired me to do the same for every image on all of my websites, because that color style is amazing.</description>
<description>A blog that is now well-known for its "webshit weekly", which makes fun of the top posts on Hackernews and their comments. It includes whole article contents in the RSS items, so you can read that feed without ever leaving your feed reader.</description>
<p>A feed of my own creation which assembles the #fridaypostcards from tilde.town.</p>
<p><ahref="http://tilde.town/~jumblesale/fp.html"target="_blank">Friday postcards</a> are a concept made by ~jumblesale on tilde.town in which you share a URL to an image along with "#fridaypostcard" (and optionally a comment) on IRC, and a bot picks it up and builds an HTML page every Friday.</p>
<p><ahref="http://tilde.town/~jumblesale/fp/archive/">An archive</a> gets generated each week too, but there was no easy way to get postcards in my RSS reader and I had found multiple issues in the way URLs were handled, causing some Imgur URLs to not work among other things. I at first had copy-pasted the original script, but then rewrote it to handle those errors and get every single postcard ever made into one W3C-valid RSS feed.</p>
<p>You can browse the script that generates this feed <ahref="https://tildegit.org/lucidiot/fprss/"target="_blank">on tildegit</a>.</p>
<description>A public transit researcher that mostly talks about the many issues in public transit. The most common trend you will quickly notice if you start reading regularly is that every American transit planner is either an idiot or forced to make bad decisions by politicians or other idiots, that construction costs are insanely high, and that cars are going to keep their supremacy for a long while. This just reinforces the idea that I should stay in Eurasia and never ever try to go to North America.</description>
<p>I stopped reading technology news from aggregators like Hacker News or lobste.rs, due to their numerous issues as highlighted by n-gate, and I do not read from mainstream tech websites either because 99% of what they publish does not interest me. Additionally, most publications will just wake up my resent for modern technology since it ignores most of its own issues, so I keep my anger at bay by not reading anything.</p>
<p>A few months ago, ~netscape_navigator showed me his "recent reading" list, for which I requested an RSS feed. He uses it in <ahref="https://rickcarlino.com/2017/developer-news-productivity-hack.html"target="_blank">an interesting process</a> to feed on the news while driving using text-to-speech, and just decided to publish his curated news feed. I now generally see this feed as my "wholesome news" feed, because most articles on there are about interesting scientific discoveries, hacking projects, tech history podcasts and articles, etc. There still are some bad news but they are much less related to current politics or other issues of the tech industry like e-waste, america-centrism or racism.</p>
<p>You could probably argue this is kind of a <ahref="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/circle_jerk"target="_blank">circle jerk</a>, since I am only reading the news from my friends who are more likely to share the same opinions as me; but this feed does not really have that many news, and I am already well aware of the most important issues in tech since I will still see them being discussed on IRC, tilde.news, Misskey, or at the workplace. They are discussed enough for me to just not want them to pollute my RSS reader as well, a place where I can go with the expectation to either relax or learn things. Having this feed here helps me get more interesting articles from lesser-known English-speaking news websites that I simply never heard of in France, such as <em>Scientific American</em>, or discover new blogs.</p>
<p>You can also <ahref="https://news.rickcarlino.com/">view the articles in a browser</a>, but why would you do that when you have an RSS reader?</p>
<p>Have you heard about the <ahref="http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles"target="_blank">500-mile email</a> story? If not, do go read it, it is a classic for nerds. Someone made a website listing various other interesting troubleshooting stories like those, and there is an RSS feed!</p>
<p>Updates are pretty rare, but it still an interesting feed to have; on the rare occasion that a new article gets there, you know you're in for an great read.</p>
]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Publications Office of the European Union</title>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Oct 2021 09:02:47 +0200</pubDate>
<p>Did you know that the EU has a publications office, dedicated to all of the EU's legal texts, magazines, or other publications. They used to maintain a website called the EU Bookshop, which allows you to order their publications, some of them for free and with no shipping fees for addresses within the European Union. The site went through a redesign earlier this year, and while I have some complaints, it seems they upgraded their servers and I no longer can create HTTP 502 errors just by clicking a little too fast; and more importantly, you can have RSS feeds.</p>
<p>If you register for an account, you can save your searches and then either create email alerts about any new publication in the search results, or get an RSS feed of it. I use that to follow various terms like <em>bookmark</em>, <em>postcard</em>, <em>calendar</em> and <em>USB</em>: I know some people who collect bookmarks, the free postcards they make give me nice illustrations for my notebooks, the calendars usually are large A0 posters so I can fill my wall with them, and they used to offer three publications in the form of USB drives, so I stay on the lookout for that. I should probably also add <em>notebook</em> to the lot, because I have a drawer full of free notebooks. My very first Bullet Journal was started on one of those books.</p>
<p>The website is supposed to only allow you to order one free copy per email address (or per account if you registered, since you can also order without registering), and you will need to confirm your email address if you order as a guest. Since some mail providers like Gmail let you get away with putting dots or dashes in your address and will redirect to your actual email, you can actually get much more from a single address; I was using only the dots and counted in binary to get all the possible unique combinations of dots while ordering a hundred USB keys or nearly a hundred notebooks. I got them all, in a hundred separate envelopes. That was a lot of fun :D</p>
<p>Yet another of my friend's blogs. Can you feel that my presence in their social circle influences their decision to provide RSS or Atom feeds?</p>
<p>This good friend has built his own static site generator, and built a few more, and we sometimes joke that all that he does is build site generators instead of writing actual blog content. But his feed (and thus his blog) sometimes fill up with some interesting articles anyway. You can in particular get some great examples of well written documentation if you want some inspiration to make this often overlooked part of software development a little nicer in your own projects.</p>
<p>Did you know that Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Messenger Plus! Live, Yahoo Messenger and Mercury Messenger all have not died at all, and that people loved them so much that there is now a Python FOSS server to replace Microsoft's and Yahoo's servers?</p>
<p><ahref="https://escargot.chat"target="_blank">Escargot</a> is a project to revive all of those clients and extra tools, and bring them back into 2021. It is already currently possible to talk between MSN and Yahoo Messenger, and there are plans to maybe, in the long term, support Matrix, XMPP, IRC, or AIM (which already has a server from another project called NINA), to really bring together all of those messaging services.</p>
<p>As I have been occasionally using a Windows XP laptop as my daily driver for a few days each time, I have kept a MSN Messenger 7.5 instance running. Just one friend got in touch with me using it, but I just like to see it being online in my notification area anyway. I also have installed Mercury Messenger on my phone so I can really stay online on MSN all the damn time. If you want to reach me there, and somehow manage to get an Escargot account and a compatible client installed, you can find my Escargot ID on <ahref="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/contact.html"target="_blank">my contact page</a>.</p>
<p>I just discovered today that Escargot has an RSS feed for its recent news, Escargot Today. And it does not just include the last 5 or 10 posts like most blogs do, this feed just has every single news entry since 2017, which is neat. There are not that many updates since most of the project's true activity is on their GitLab repo, but if you plan on playing with this client, this feed will make sure you don't miss out on any breaking changes they might make. You can also access that page on newer versions of MSN since they changed the MSN Today URL to point at their site.</p>
<p>Remeber my previous adventures with Pale Moon where I configured it to quickly subscribe to TinyTinyRSS? Well, ~m455 reminded me of the existence of SeaMonkey today. It has a mail client, newsgroups, feed subscriptions, IRC, and a HTML editor, and never dropped FTP support. You can also get Gopher support by installing <ahref="https://addons.thunderbird.net/fr/seamonkey/addon/overbiteff/">OverbiteFF</a>; it says SeaMonkey 2.43 and later is not supported, but it worked just fine for me under SeaMonkey 2.49.5.</p>
<p>Back when I was using Pale Moon, I could not find out how to add a new option without removing the existing ones so I just overwrote Yahoo with TinyTinyRSS. But this time, I got it to work with an extra setting! Here is the configuration in <code>about:config</code> that I managed to use for SeaMonkey:</p>
<p>Here is an RSS feed generated by Substack, a service that I have very regularly seen recently due to everyone using it to create paid newsletters. I absolutely despise e-mail newsletters, but they dealt with that problem by adding an RSS 2.0 feed for each newsletter at <code>/feed</code>. As Substack really scares me due to this e-mail part, I have never tried paying for one of those newsletters, so I do not know if that RSS feed would be available too for paid subscribers, maybe with a token. That would make it a very rare kind of paid RSS feeds, something which I know exists as I have seen it in a specification for the PlayStation Portable but that I have never seen in the wild before.</p>
<p>This particular feed is a free newsletter about space exploration from an Indian writer. He initially had two newsletters, <em>Space Impact</em> and <em>Moon Monday</em>, but they got merged into one. I initially discovered this blog through <em>Moon Monday</em>, a weekly report of everything that is happening related to our exploration of the Moon. The goal of this weekly report is to show that exploring the Moon is still on the table and that we still have a lot to learn about it. Things happen quickly enough that posting once a week is indeed necessary.</p>
<p>The reporting is generally pretty comprehensive, despite a noticeable bias against <abbrtitle="Indian Space Research Organization">ISRO</abbr>; the author regularly criticizes his own country's space program as it is often opaque or makes bad decisions. I would like to see more of this critical thinking applied to all the other reported events (which are usually only shown as facts, without much commentary), as there are a lot of issues with Artemis, the American lunar base program, and with <abbrtitle="International Lunar Research Station">ILRS</abbr>, the Russian and Chinese project.</p>
<p>NASA going fully commercial on the base, all the way to calling for proposals on spacesuits, vehicles that transport astronauts between their training building to the launch pad, rovers, communication satellites, etc., and potentially allowing companies to mine the Moon, means NASA is bringing capitalism to space along with all its issues. Roscosmos' space budget is being slashed by Putin, because they did not achieve their set objectives in time—obviously, less budget will mean they can do more next year. And China's space program had a lot of issues, since rocket parts sometimes fall onto inhabitants (a huge no for absolutely everyone else), and most of what we know about the program comes from leaks.</p>
<p>But I would never have learned about all of these issues without having this blog as a starting point, teaching me about the current state of the space industry and scientific community, which have been completely transformed in the last few years. So if you are interested in learning more about space and what we're planning about it, I cannot recommend it enough.</p>
Some interesting tales from a sysadmin, mostly of incidents in production and their mismanagement. It is an interesting read for me sometimes since I do not have any experience in larger companies. The mismanagement part really makes me realize how lucky I am to not have said experience.
<p>If you look for "aesthetic" pictures on Tumblr, and you filter out all the stuff with a synthwave pink and blue palette or the photoshopped stuff, you'll probably find a lot of Windows 9x screenshots. I found this aptly named blog, full of screenshots, and it's a pretty nice source of inspiration for when I want to do things on my Windows 98 SE virtual machine.</p>
<p>With those screenshots, I had found some software a few months ago called <ahref="https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/"target="_blank">PlantStudio</a> and it is impressive. There are some screenshots I haven't really exploited yet, mostly of Japanese software. I really am fond of exploring the Japanese web, be it through some of their attempts at creating internet standards like HINA or through the software they created.</p>
<p>Speaking of, It makes me a little sad that Japanese websites are slowly switching to the more "modern" designs we see now, like flat design, and are not keeping the condensed, efficient looks they had before. I used to browse Pixiv regularly, and while its new design is a bit more useful to English speakers, I had gotten used to knowing from memory what each link was in Japanese in the old design and the new one made me lose a ton of features. I wish we could just all go back in time and destroy JavaScript to prevent all of this.</p>
<p>A plaintext webcomic made by a friend of mine who coined the term <em>Rsszard of Syndication</em> to describe me and seems me as a <ahref="http://tilde.town/~dozens/feeds/feeds.png"target="_blank">monster feeding on feeds</a>. Many comics are inspired by conversations we have on IRC, so they share the same kind of weird humor.</p>
<p>The feed is currently broken due to improper XML quoting, and the repo is being moved from another Gitea instance that has had serious technical issues for a while, so it is a bit messy. I opened <ahref="https://tildegit.org/dozens/protoad/issues/1"target="_blank">an issue</a> to get it resolved.</p>
This is a very interesting blog that ran in 2019 with one post a day. Each post studied one <abbrtitle="Request for Comments">RFC</abbr> at once, starting from the very first one, and its author went as far as visiting the <ahref="https://www.computerhistory.org/">Computer History Museum</a> to get access to the original RFCs as they were before they got poorly transcribed into their current online forms, as they included handwritten diagrams. That blog is now dead, but if you want to learn about the history of the Internet, this is a very good resource. This taught me among other things that Telnet is older than the Internet itself.
<p>You know you just can't go wrong with a name like that.</p>
<p>This feed is from a newsletter than also offers an RSS feed and fax delivery. Its author mostly focuses on the history of technology on various subjects, and has taught me as many things as the previously mentioned <ahref="https://write.as/365-rfcs/"target="_blank">365 RFCs</a> project.</p>
<p>I was preparing to post yet another feed I subscribe to on this feed, then I realized that I've been at it for a while and checked the date of the very first post of this feed. It turns out RSRSSS has had its first anniversary two weeks ago, on December 15<sup>th</sup>!</p>
<p>I wasn't really expecting to be able to keep up posting some things to this feed for a whole year, especially considering that I have multiple other websites to take care of and that this year has been hectic.</p>
<p>I still have a pretty long list of things I would like to post about, more interesting posts that just throwing a feed around at random. Let's admit it, when I post a feed, it's just to keep posting regularly when I just don't have the time.</p>
<p>I have been posting about some of my programming projects over on <ahref="https://brainshit.fr"target="_blank">my French blog</a>, and I have been thinking about posts on RSRSSS or on feeds in general later this year. This might give me some fuel to post more on this meta-feed. For now though, I'm posting about parsing geospatial data, and I'll follow that with a dozen articles on some reverse engineering I've been doing. There are so many posts I want to write everywhere and I have so little time and energy…</p>
<p>I have no idea who is even reading this feed since I don't have any stats and I don't want any, but if you've been reading this for the whole year, well thank you very much. Let's hope RSRSSS stays up for another year!</p>
<p>For the first time in this feed, here's a feed generator!</p>
<p>There are many tools to generate RSS feeds from HTML pages, and some of them might just be point and click and they might work for pages that are relatively simple. Some work by looking for semantic HTML tags like <code><article></code>, or some require you to write some CSS or XPath selectors or just do some code. But my favorite kind of tool is some program or website that is dedicated to serving RSS feeds for some particular websites, for which feeds are regularly asked for but the devs are refusing to. I guess this somehow falls under the category of <ahref="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability"target="_blank">adversarial interoperability</a>. Providing an RSS feed for a website against its publisher's will is one of many ways to prevent it from being a completely closed environment, and force it to fit the philosophy of the web, which is to <em>share</em>.</p>
<p>I have done a few of those feed generators over time, and I even published one of its feeds on here. But I had yet to see someone in my Internet circle do something similar. <ahref="https://chitter.xyz/users/codl"target="_blank">@codl</a>, a cool friend, made <ahref="https://feedplz.codl.fr/"target="_blank">Feedplz</a>, a service that provides RSS and Atom feeds for <ahref="https://www.furaffinity.net/"target="_blank">FurAffinity</a> and <ahref="https://ssp-comics.com/"target="_blank">SSP-Comics</a>. If you are interested in those websites, definitely check this service out and give codl some love.</p>
<p>It's always great to see someone other than me show some interest in feeds, especially to the point of creating new feeds. This service might not have the most well written Python code, or might break easily should any of those websites choose to change something, but it has the merit of existing and of being a reminder that feeds do exist and that some people want them. Just that alone gives me warm fuzzies.</p>
<p>~elioat made me discover <ahref="https://codemadness.org/sfeed-simple-feed-parser.html"target="_blank">sfeed</a>, a tool that parses RSS and Atom feeds and can generate a list of items in multiple formats, including a static HTML page, a <ahref="https://twtxt.readthedocs.org/en/stable/"target="_blank">twtxt</a> feed, or an Atom feed. This is what it looks like on Eli's own setup:</p>
<li><ahref="https://txt.eli.li/pb/rss/exported-feeds.opml"target="_blank">An OPML export of all the subscriptions</a></li>
<li><ahref="https://txt.eli.li/pb/rss/feeds.atom"target="_blank">An Atom feed combining every subscription</a></li>
<li><ahref="http://txt.eli.li/pb/rss/feeds.txt"target="_blank">A twtxt feed combining every subscription</a></li>
</ul>
<p>While the Atom feed feels a little crude to me, a constant abuser of XML namespaces inside of feeds, I like the idea of what is basically a static site generator whose content comes from feeds. Static sites always feel much more manageable to me, be it as a developer, as a server administrator, or as an archivist. I do have an archivist side, with how much I've been using the Internet Archive in all my projects.</p>
<p>Some websites like YouTube or Tumblr still provide syndication feeds, but rarely advertise them. They would rather see its use die down until they can safely just remove it, because managing a single page that generates a bunch of XML is way too much to ask for in a world full of JavaScript, JSON and social media. Websites whose audience are usually developers like GitHub or GitLab generally do the opposite and serve more feeds because the devs want them. It is quite unfortunate that syndication feeds are now mostly restricted to technical people, and I'm pretty sure Google Reader's death is partly to blame.</p>
<p>DeviantArt is not aimed at developers but deviants (I guess they're both <em>devs</em>?) but still provides some RSS feeds. With their recent redesign, they have been doing away with most of their comfy and featureful interface to replace it with some laggy experience that's inconsistent with its own mobile apps. Every switch back to a page that still uses the old UI is a breath of fresh air.</p>
<p>One of those pages is the <ahref="https://www.deviantart.com/developers/rss">RSS feeds documentation</a>, which also makes me a little worried that they might do away with RSS feeds at some point. They still do serve RSS feeds anyway, allowing you to search for deviations or journal entries. The feeds use Media RSS, which could make them usable on a Playstation Portable if you know how to work around the SSL issues. There is one base URL for all of the feeds:</p>
<p>The query parameters for the feeds are pretty poorly documented, so here is my attempt at it:</p>
<dl>
<dt>limit</dt>
<dd>How many items to return at once. Defaults to and cannot exceed 60.</dd>
<dt>q</dt>
<dd>
Search query. When omitted, the feed will return the most popular results. The search syntax is <ahref="https://www.deviantartsupport.com/en/article/are-there-any-tricks-to-narrowing-down-a-search-on-deviantart"target="_blank">partially documented on the official help center</a>. Additional operators that are not documented on this page include:
<dl>
<dt>boost:</dt>
<dd>The only known value is <code>popular</code>, to sort by most popular.</dd>
<dt>by:</dt>
<dd>Synonym for the officially documented <code>username:</code>. Filters by the name of the submitter.</dd>
<dt>gallery:</dt>
<dd>Synonym for the officially documented <code>username:</code>. Filters by the name of the submitter.</dd>
<dt>location_tag:</dt>
<dd>Filter by a location tag.</dd>
<dt>in:</dt>
<dd>Filters by a category. Category names here are pretty poorly documented, especially since DeviantArt is doing away with categories, but they seem to all have a name only in lowercase and with no spaces. For subcategories, use a slash as a path separator: <code>digitalart/drawings</code>.</dd>
<dt>sort:</dt>
<dd>
Change the sorting mode. Values are that are known to work include:
<dl>
<dt>popular</dt>
<dd>Sort by most popular first.</dd>
<dt>time</dt>
<dd>Sort by most recent first.</dd>
</dl>
This filter overrides both <code>boost:</code> and <code>special:</code>.
</dd>
<dt>special:</dt>
<dd>
Special filter? I don't know, it's pretty redundant. Known values include:
<dl>
<dt>popular</dt>
<dd>Sort by most popular first.</dd>
<dt>newest</dt>
<dd>Sort by most recent first.</dd>
<dt>critiquable</dt>
<dd>Only include deviations that accept critiques. Now causes an HTTP 500 error.</dd>
</dl>
Any other value seems to cause an HTTP 500 error.
</dd>
<dt>subject_tag:</dt>
<dd>Filter by a subject tag.</dd>
<dt>tag:</dt>
<dd>Filter by a tag.</dd>
</dl>
</dd>
<dt>offset</dt>
<dd>Offset to start at, for pagination. Defaults to zero. You can also use the <code><atom link rel="next" /></code> tags to get pre-made URLs for the next page.</dd>
<dt>order</dt>
<dd>
An integer controlling the sorting. This is overriden by any sorting options specified in <code>q</code>.<br/>
It seems that the only two valid values are <code>9</code> for most popular, and any other integer for newest.
</dd>
<dt>type</dt>
<dd>
Type of items to retrieve. Values that are known to work include:
<ul>
<li>deviation (default)</li>
<li>journal</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>
<p>Some of those query parameters were found by digging through a million URLs archived by the Wayback Machine using <ahref="https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server"target="_blank">their CDX server</a>.</p>
<p>If you have any further knowledge that should be added here, feel free to <ahref="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/contact.html"target="_blank">contact me</a></p>.
<p>This feed shows you what happens when a Kerbal Space Program player wants to play <em>realistically</em>. The Kerbal Space Agency is a fictional space agency that tries to play in real Earth time and starts from the very beginning with weather balloons or sounding rockets. The project has been going on for a few years and is mostly active <ahref="https://twitter.com/KSA_MissionCtrl"target="_blank">on Twitter</a>, with the website providing summaries, off-character commentary, and a <ahref="http://www.kerbalspace.agency/Tracker/tracker.asp"target="_blank">mission tracker</a> that fetches data straight from the save file.</p>
<p>The project has been much more silent since the pandemic, and there have been no news at all on whether or not it will be coming back, so for now this feed is quite inactive. However, the history there is pretty interesting to read still.</p>
<p>Since this is a WordPress blog, you can also get the <ahref="http://www.kerbalspace.agency/ksa/?feed=atom&launch=false&maneuver=false"target="_blank">Atom feed</a> or the <ahref="http://www.kerbalspace.agency/ksa/?feed=rdf&launch=false&maneuver=false">RDF Site Summary feed</a>.</p>
<title>The USA's definition of an RSS feed</title>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2022 23:16:35 +0100</pubDate>
<guidisPermaLink="false">govinfo-fail</guid>
<link>https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds</link>
<description><