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?

This feed indeed has some interesting things, related to SCP, sci-fi (especially time traveling), or programming. I bookmarked the Perl introduction, if I ever want to learn Perl and scare my fellow Python developers at work.

Some of my favorite things with Pale Moon include turning it into Netscape, sync support, 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.

Here comes the trusty about:config to the rescue! Looking up yahoo in the configuration values pointed me to two keys in the configuration:

browser.contentHandlers.types.0.title

Initially set to My Yahoo!, I changed it to TinyTinyRSS.

browser.contentHandlers.types.0.uri

Initially set to https://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=%s, I changed it to https://rss.envs.net/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s. I found this URL by looking at the bookmarklets configuration in TinyTinyRSS and reading the short JS code that redirects you to TinyTinyRSS.

I initially tried to add a button next to the My Yahoo! one by creating two new keys, .types.1.title and .types.1.uri, but that failed. I did not yet look into the Pale Moon source code to see why this could have failed.

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…

<xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

disable-output-escaping is optional according to the W3C specification since version 1. libxslt, Chromium and Internet Explorer do support it, but Firefox chose not to, and a Bugzilla ticket 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.

https://www.bbc.com/weather/2644080

Take this integer suffix, which is the ID of the location, and put it in one of these two URLs to get some RSS feeds:

• 3-day forecasts: https://weather-broker-cdn.api.bbci.co.uk/en/forecast/rss/3day/2644080
• Latest observations: https://weather-broker-cdn.api.bbci.co.uk/en/observation/rss/2644080

This procedure is documented exactly like so on the BBC help pages!

Replace rss2 with atom for an Atom feed, and with rdf for an RSS 1.0 feed.

I added a distinction between RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 in ITSB 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.

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.

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.

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 Webmentions, or the trackback namespace for RSS.

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: mod_annotation, 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.

To use this module, first add a new XML namespace to your feed: xmlns:annotate="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/annotate/". Then, in the <item> tag, add the following tag to reference something else:

<annotate:reference rdf:resource="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/"/>

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.

Turns out RFC 4685 defines an XML namespace one can use to define replies. It is rather similar to yesterday's mod_annotation.

To use this namespace, you will need to first add the namespace to your feed: xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0". You then have access to two new elements and two new attributes, and the spec also defines a new rel value:

• <thr:in-reply-to> to indicate what you are replying to using the ID indicated in the <id> tag;
• <link rel="replies"> to point to a page where some, or all, known replies to a post are listed;
• thr:updated to add on the above link the last date when the page was updated;
• thr:count to add on the above link the number of known replies listed in the linked page;
• <thr:total> to indicate the total number of known replies, as the linked replies pages might only contain a portion of them.

None of those are required. You can repeat the <link rel="replies" /> as many times as you might need, if you have multiple pages. The metadata given by the <thr:total> element and the thr:count and thr:updated attributes is non-authoritative, which means it does not have to be exact.

If you are using <thr:in-reply-to>, it is recommended to also include the post's link in a <link rel="related"> to allow a graceful fallback for feed readers that might not support the threading extensions.

The RFC includes a bunch of examples that should be enough to get you started should you ever want to try using this namespace.

Some other formats

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 ITSB:

JSON Feed 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.

Channel Definition Format 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 thr or mod_annotation.

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.

I first translated HINA, 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.

Today, I translated LIRS, a format that uses a gzipped simili-CSV to report the same thing.

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.

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 ITSB just for the sake of keeping them alive.

Friday postcards 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.

An archive 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.

You can browse the script that generates this feed on tildegit.

A few months ago, ~netscape_navigator showed me his "recent reading" list, for which I requested an RSS feed. He uses it in an interesting process 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.

You could probably argue this is kind of a circle jerk, 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 Scientific American, or discover new blogs.

You can also view the articles in a browser, but why would you do that when you have an RSS reader?

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.

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 bookmark, postcard, calendar and USB: 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 notebook to the lot, because I have a drawer full of free notebooks. My very first Bullet Journal was started on one of those books.

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

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.

Escargot 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.

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 my contact page.

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.