<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>
<dt>browser.contentHandlers.types.0.uri</dt>
<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>
</dl>
<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>
</ul>
<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</count> 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.itef.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>
<h2>Some other formats</h2>
<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>
