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:
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:
https://weather-broker-cdn.api.bbci.co.uk/en/forecast/rss/3day/2644080
https://weather-broker-cdn.api.bbci.co.uk/en/observation/rss/2644080
This procedure is documented exactly like so on the BBC help pages!
]]>Feed type | URL parameters | URL rewriting |
---|---|---|
All posts | /?feed=rss2 |
/feed/rss2/ |
All comments | /?feed=comments-rss2 |
/comments/feed/rss2/ |
Comments on a post | /?p=42&feed=rss2 |
/[post name]/feed/rss2/ |
In categories | /?cat=1,2,3&feed=rss2 |
/category/cat1,cat2,cat3/feed/rss2/ |
In tags | /?tag=tag1,tag2,tag3&feed=rss2 |
/tag/tag1,tag2,tag3/feed/rss2/ |
In all categories | /?cat=1+2+3&feed=rss2 |
/category/cat1+cat2+cat3/feed/rss2/ |
In tags | /?tag=tag1+tag2+tag3&feed=rss2 |
/tag/tag1+tag2+tag3/feed/rss2/ |
By author | Undocumented | /author/[name]/feed/rss2/ |
Search results | ?s=[query]&feed=rss2 |
— |
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.
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.
]]>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 about:config
that I managed to use for SeaMonkey:
TinyTinyRSS
application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
https://rss.envs.net/public.php?op=subscribe&feed_url=%s
/feed
. 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.
This particular feed is a free newsletter about space exploration from an Indian writer. He initially had two newsletters, Space Impact and Moon Monday, but they got merged into one. I initially discovered this blog through Moon Monday, 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.
The reporting is generally pretty comprehensive, despite a noticeable bias against ISRO; 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 ILRS, the Russian and Chinese project.
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.
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.
]]>With those screenshots, I had found some software a few months ago called PlantStudio 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.
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.
]]>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 an issue to get it resolved.
]]>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 365 RFCs project.
]]>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.
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.
I have been posting about some of my programming projects over on my French blog, 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…
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!
]]>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 <article>
, 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 adversarial interoperability. 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 share.
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. @codl, a cool friend, made Feedplz, a service that provides RSS and Atom feeds for FurAffinity and SSP-Comics. If you are interested in those websites, definitely check this service out and give codl some love.
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.
]]>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.
]]>DeviantArt is not aimed at developers but deviants (I guess they're both devs?) 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.
One of those pages is the RSS feeds documentation, 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:
https://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml
The query parameters for the feeds are pretty poorly documented, so here is my attempt at it:
popular
, to sort by most popular.username:
. Filters by the name of the submitter.username:
. Filters by the name of the submitter.digitalart/drawings
.boost:
and special:
.
<atom link rel="next" />
tags to get pre-made URLs for the next page.q
.9
for most popular, and any other integer for newest.
Some of those query parameters were found by digging through a million URLs archived by the Wayback Machine using their CDX server.
If you have any further knowledge that should be added here, feel free to contact me.
]]>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.
Since this is a WordPress blog, you can also get the Atom feed or the RDF Site Summary feed.
]]>So if you have been coding in PHP, ASP.NET, or ColdFusion, you will now know that you have been writing nothing but RSS feeds the whole time!
I couldn't find out what truly is the .sfm
file extension, so if you know about it, please let me know.
I guess having that Atom feed was quite predictable, considering that Atom has been standardized in RFC 4287. Also note that RFCs should now be written using a specific XML format, also defined in another RFC; RFC 7991 being the current version. It feels quite strange to me to see such "high-level" formats in an RFC; I am more used to seeing RFCs about lower-level protocols like TCP/IP or BGP.
]]>!post
command on his private IRC server to let a user post a link with some title to a webpage. The project kicked off nicely by not having any HTML sanitization, so the trolls (and QA engineers I guess) that we are on this IRC server sent tons of JavaScript, CSS overrides, iframes, background music, etc. That broke the RSS feed, but the sanitization is now properly in place and the feed is usable. If you are curious to see what our little corner of the internet finds on other corners of the internet, feel free to look around and subscribe to the feed.
]]>Accept
header to application/rss+xml
or application/atom+xml
, or by appending .rss
or .atom
to a username.
For example, you can check out the RSS feed and the Atom feed for my profile on tildegit.org, the Gitea instance hosted by and for the tildeverse.
This is a nice first step, though I feel that user feeds are among the least useful of all the feeds that most common Git platforms provide. As I also maintain Alpine Linux packages, help manage breadpunk.club and manage my own server at home, the feeds that would matter the most to me are the tags or release notes feeds. Those feeds are the most efficient way to be notified of any new releases on most software, and I have opened some issues in the past to ask some maintainers to use Git tags just so I can use the feed.
There is an issue for global feed support, and it is on the 1.17.0 roadmap. I subscribed to it, using the unfortunately email-based GitHub notification system, and will definitely follow it closely.
]]>Most posts are just random automated posts made by bots that were created to convert RSS feeds to ActivityPub, but sometimes I can find some nice things. I got the opportunity to mention HINA at some point, and this week I found a new feed to add to my reader, Grab Free Games. The website's goal is pretty simple: tell you about any Steam games that are temporarily available for free, so that you can add them immediately to your Steam library and them prompty forget about them and never play them. Truly an amazing tool!
]]>If you are more of an IETF fan, you can also get an Atom feed.
]]><managingEditor>
and <webMaster>
must use e-mail addresses, and both also explicitly state that the webMaster
is the e-mail address to contact for technical issues regarding the feed, most developers and users of RSS feeds and feed readers do not seem to have that in mind. Most feeds do not use those tags or might not even use valid e-mail addresses. Since most feed readers are focused on just getting the user to read some articles, and spit out some incomprehensible error or fail silently when something is wrong in a feed, they do not use those tags even when they are correctly specified to let the user ask for help.
I could go and ask for some enhancements to error reporting on all feed readers, but that would be extremely exhausting, as most work in open-source projects feels to me—I definitely am not great at communication. Instead, here is a small initiative that RSS feed developers can make to make the internals of their RSS feed generation system more visible and, for a user that is curious enough to be reading the feed's source, point directly to where they can complain at.
One of the approved RSS 1.0 modules, mod_admin
, also called the Administrative Module, defines an XML namespace, xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
, and two extra tags you can use:
<admin:generatorAgent>
rdf:resource
attribute to point to the feed generator. This is redundant with the RSS 2.0 <generator>
tag, and the W3C Feed Validation Service will complain if you use both tags at once, but with this new tag, you can specify a URI instead of some arbitrary string, which could let a feed reader make a link available more easily.<admin:errorReportsTo>
rdf:resource
attribute should point to somewhere to report issues with this feed. This is usually a mailto:
URI, but you could also point it to a contact form over HTTP. This is similar to the <webMaster>
tag, but the W3C validator does not complain about a redundancy here, so you can safely use both.By adding <admin:generatorAgent>
to your feed, you could let some random developer, let's say, me, look at your RSS feed generation code, and maybe find the bug for you. By adding <admin:errorReportsTo>
, a tag name that is more explicit than webMaster
, with a clickable mailto:
link or a link to a contact form, you can make it easier for curious users and random developers to tell you that something is wrong.
It is obviously not that likely that some random user is going to look at the source of the feed when something is wrong, but considering that content syndication over feeds is dying and that most of its remaining users are the tech-savvy ones, it is not impossible.
And if, like me, you are using an XSLT as your <?xml-stylesheet?>
, you could add a link to report errors with your feed if someone is displaying it in a browser. If you open RSRSSS in your web browser and your browser does not have native support for RSS feeds, then you can find this link at the very bottom of the page.
As mentioned earlier when I talked about the 1.16.0 release, the feeds are accessible either by setting the Accept
header to application/rss+xml
or application/atom+xml
when requesting a user, an organization or a repository's URL, or by appending .rss or .atom to the username, repository name or organization name. Some examples:
I hope that we will see the feeds for releases in the next release, so that Gitea adds the one missing feature to make package maintainers happy.
By the way, the RSS feed for the RSRSSS repo could be called the Really Simple RSRSSS Repository Syndication feed, or RSRSRSSSRS.
]]>pandoc
. While the regular touting of Markdown as if it was the most perfect markup ever in most of the links shared on this blog annoys me, the suggestions can be inspiring to build your own plain text systems, and the author encourages using RSS feeds. You can get featured in it as well, by getting a quick interview over email on how you use plaintext.
]]>I mentioned reaching 200 feeds on IRC, and ~dozens awarded me a badge for my outstanding feedchievement!
I have quite the backlog of feeds to share on here. Feel free to harass me if I don't post one each week, because I have no excuse.
]]>robots.txt
file.
To use it within RSS and Atom feeds, you will need to add the namespace to the root tag as usual: xmlns:access="http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0"
. You can then add the access:restriction
element as a child of the root element, with the relationship
attribute set to allow
or deny
. When the element is not set, allow
will be assumed. If the feed had previously set deny
, removing the element will still cause aggregators to keep assuming a denial; allow
must be explicitly set to restore indexability.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:access="http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0"> <access:restriction relationship="deny" /> <channel> <!-- ... --> </channel> </rss>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:access="http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0"> <access:restriction relationship="deny" /> <!-- ... --> </feed>
Note that this is the only case I know of where an RSS extension adds a tag outside of both <channel>
and <item>
.
books
repository.
This Git repo hosts a CSV file exported from dozens' Calibre library. The file is also converted to a recfile, and with my help to an RSS feed. This was set up after dozens shared some of his collection with the casakhstan, and we got interested in it and any new additions to it.
If you are interested in a book found within this library, feel free to contact ~dozens to request one of the ebooks. You wouldn't download an ebook, wouldn't you?
]]>While looking for some sort of authoritative source for the definition of a hypergrid, I found Outworldz, a website full of resources related to OpenSimulator, the server software that runs all of those worlds. Its name seems to be a pun on InWorldz, one of the largest commercial OpenSimulator grids, which has existed from 2010 to 2018 before shutting down and seemingly starting from scratch.
I am quite curious about those old virtual worlds, especially now with all this metaverse bullshit. I browsed around a bit and realized they provide an RSS feed of the LSL scripts shared on this website. LSL, or the Linden Scripting Language, is the scripting language made by Linden Lab for Second Life. Scripting is how most of the virtual worlds come to life; be it enabling automatic transactions, sending messages, embedding YouTube videos to create movie theaters, etc., LSL can become important quite fast if you want to do interesting things in OpenSim. So here it is, a feed that genuinely surprised me, full of interesting content for a community that sounds inactive today, but still definitely exists.
]]>/now
page or /uses
page, this could become the /ideas
page on your personal website.
I made my ideas page into an RSS feed after I rewrote the page so it would be generated from a recfile, so here it is. If you have made your own ideas page, feel free to let me know and I'll feature you in the section at the bottom of the webpage.
]]>For example, feeds that just have pretty images don't need much spoons to process, while blogs with in-depths reflections on some topics will take more time to read. I can skim through some feeds while barely reading the post titles, but some other feeds have items that are actual tasks to complete. I have seen various posts about people saying you should weed out as much as you can from your feedreader because you will never read everything, but the point is not always to read everything.
When I was doing my categorizing, I had been asked on IRC about which categories I use and why, so this post is a more thought-out reply.
I am probably not fully done with categorizing, but I got a pretty good list right now. My current list of categories does represent how I use my feed reader pretty well, and over 90% of the feeds have a category right now. Here's a summary of those categories:
Some of those categories explain why I am not yet sharing an OPML export of the feeds I currently subscribe to; some feeds have a private token embedded in the URL for authentication, or some are not meant to be shared too publicly. Managing a custom OPML export from TinyTinyRSS would be a bit too much work whenever I subscribe or unsubscribe from a feed. Instead, you'll just get the feeds featured in RSRSSS as an OPML file, as I slowly work my way through my subscriptions or other feeds that I find interesting and share them on here.
]]>There are a few more specific feeds if you want just one category of their posts.
]]>I have been logging my dreams on and off for multiple years in my notebooks. I had intially started that as a quest to do lucid dreaming, a quest that I gave up on because reality checks are a really difficult routine to get into and they weren't bringing much of a result. The lucid in lucid dreaming was the original inspiration for my nickname. I kept on logging my dreams after that because I was still interested in remembering my dreams, and I nowadays also use this as an excuse to write at least one line a day in a notebook, since that is a habit I want to keep; when I do not remember a dream, I will still write I did not remember my dreams.
Getting those random dreams in my feedreader is what got me started in posting my own dream logs on my wiki. I might end up separating them at some point, as I am slowly working my way through all the dreams I have logged over the years in many notebooks, translating them and obfuscating them for public consumption.
My dreams almost always involve me with some family members or friends in a very bizarre situation, but still in keeping with most of the laws of physics, whereas dozens' dreams appear to have a much more malleable world. That might be related to me being much less exposed to fantasy or RPGs and having much less creativity.
]]>dozens, now a recurring character in this feed, summarized me in an original way:
]]>there's an rss devil on my shoulder telling me to make new feeds all the time, and it is lucidiot. on my other shoulder is an rss angel and it is also lucidiot and it is also always telling me make new feeds.
like how in some storylines the joker just wants batman to be the very best batman he can be. lucidiot is the rss joker to my compulsive writing batman.rssoker: everyone is just one bad day away from making another rss feed
rssatman: you're wrong rssoker
rssoker: HAHAHAHAHAH
This blog is mostly known for its random posts on Microsoft jargon (which Chen calls Microspeak) or various pieces of Windows trivia, such as why Pinball was removed from Windows, and why it cannot come back even though they want to. More recently, a post on a song that made hard drives crash resulted in a vulnerability being reported.
]]>Each status includes an emoji to summarize your current mood or state, and if you know how to use the browser's developer tools, you can make it use any Unicode character you want. You can show off your current status emoji using a badge, and I have put mine among the many others on my tilde.town page.
status.cafe provides a whole bunch of Atom feeds; you can subscribe to a feed of everyone at once or the specific feed of each user as https://status.cafe/users/[username].atom
. For example, here is mine.
While exploring the information superhighway to learn more about other feeds I wanted to post about on here, I also stumbled upon imood, which possibly was a source of inspiration for status.cafe. Statuses are called moods, and have both a personal mood (some sentence that the user writes) and a base mood selected from a set. There are no feeds on this one though, so status.cafe is clearly superior.
]]>I am building a small backlog of posts to hopefully allow me to post somewhat regularly, using something even worse than just writing XML by hand as I usually do in here. I created a database using LibreOffice Base on a whim, just because I wanted to play with that one evening, and ended up inserting about 50 feeds that I wanted to post and creating a form to start writing short descriptions of each feed to later post them.
Today, I somehow conjured the energy to rewrite the XSLT that powers the HTML rendering of this feed, on browsers that do not support RSS feeds natively. It looks more refined, and I have some ideas for future extensions such as supporting enclosures, GeoRSS, Event RSS and more. It now also includes some optional JavaScript that fixes the HTML unescaping issue on Firefox, making the feed much more readable. After finishing a first version of this new theme, I decided to finally post again and announce this possible return.
One of the many reasons why i have so little energy to post is that i feel like most of what i do is meaningless or not interesting to anyone, which is probably to be expected when i explicitly choose to ignore SEO or just when i work on very niche topics. if you want to help me fight the negative voices in my head, feel free to reach out to me. Even just a single sentence to tell me you are reading me is hugely appreciated.
]]>I have known about 100r for a while, but only follow them by reading this feed because their creations and ideas are often incompatible with my life; I do not live on a boat and do not really enjoy the kind of very minimalist, colorless aesthetic that they follow. Getting those quick monthly reminders of the existence of the concept of permacomputing, and taking a few minutes to watch those people living in what looks like an alternate universe completely separate from mine, can still be interesting in small doses.
]]>It could also have feeds for all posts by a user or all posts within a forum (a group of boards), but having the option of following this messageboard using a feedreader is still quite neat.
There also used to be a vpub instance dedicated to vpub itself at vpub.miso.town, but it appears to be offline now. m15o, vpub's creator, said they are not working on it as well.
]]>The JTS and its C++ port called GEOS power pretty much every geographical information system under the sun. I don't understand much about the math behind GIS stuff, but this blog showcases some of the new features in the JTS with some simple examples. It can help me suggest improvements at work, or get new ideas for weird projects since I like playing with maps now.
This feed is also available as an Atom feed. ]]>
Multiple RSS feeds are available, to get the PBF version, the BZ2-compressed XML version, or the entire history of the map and not just its current state. Those are documented on the OSM wiki.
I really like the name of this thing. Planet. You can just… download the whole planet. This is how far we've come as a society. Why stop at downloading a car when you can download a planet?
]]>Just as I noticed this, it turns out that the board has turned 20 just a few days ago. Happy birthday!
Discovering this also made me find out that Dave Winer is also on the Fediverse, and is just as bitter as he is rumored to be.
]]>Probably the most exotic part of this image sharing service is that every image is highly compressed: no more than 400×400 pixels in size, and saved as JPEG with a quality of 5%. This probably makes hosting this service a lot easier in terms of bandwidth and storage space, and makes the images look blurry or less detailed. Most piclog users are status.cafe users, so it's interesting to see the photographic equivalent of the things I see fellow status.cafe users post regularly.
While you can get a feed of every photo from everyone, you can also get feeds for each user, with https://piclog.blue/user-feed.php?id=
followed by the integer ID of the relevant user. You can get this ID by opening their profile, since the same ID will be in the profile URL. Here's m15o's feed for example.
As of posting this, the feeds unfortunately do not use Media RSS or embed the image into the description as an <img>
tag, so you will have to open each item in your browser to view the image with most feedreaders.
The NTSB is the one investigation agency I really must have in ITSB. It might just be the largest agency for transportation safety investigations worldwide, and anyone who ever watched a Mayday documentary or looked into plane crashes has heard of it. They produce the largest amount of reports out of all the agencies I found through ITSB.
Fortunately, they provided an official RSS feed for their released investigation reports. I'm using the past tense though, because they unfortunately decided to shut it down. The feeds were still available for a little while, but they would be completely empty. I have yet to see anyone ever sunsetting a feed properly, by adding a post to warn everyone for a few days before just killing the feed completely, so this issue went unnoticed for a while.
To generate a feed when there is no official one available, I usually just run curl
on a webpage that lists investigation reports, then use pup to select some HTML elements and convert them to a JSON structure, then mess around with said JSON with jq, and finally convert that back into XML using xmltodict. But after looking around on the NTSB's website, I went for a much weirder method.
The NTSB provides a service called CAROL, a tool to search through all the investigation reports and safety recommendations the NTSB ever published. Getting a lot of structured data sounds a lot more interesting than having to parse the scant details I can get from unnecessarily complex HTML pages, so I wanted to use that as my source for my custom feed.
After a lot of experimenting, I ended up writing a separate script that exports 1 year of completed investigation reports as a large JSON file. I could have exported 10 or more years of reports, but that resulted in an extremely large RSS feed that would make most feedreaders blow up, so I only got one year.
I then use a 671 lines long jq script to process this JSON file into an RSS feed, including as much information as I can within the <description>
so that you sometimes do not need to read the PDF report at all.
This mess results in a feed that is far, far better than any other feed I have in ITSB, especially any official feed. If every webmaster wants to remove RSS and replace it with newsletters, since that's what I gathered from my few attempts at reaching out to those agencies, maybe the real solution is to push for more open data instead. Let the people who know and use RSS make proper RSS feeds without scraping your website…
]]>A while ago, I tried to look for more blogs related to stationery, handwriting, etc., and I found The Cramped. This blog evolved a bit over time, and nowadays the author occasionally shares other people's posts related to writing, notebooks, writing in notebooks, personal knowledge management, etc. This kind of feed is nice to have if I want to discover more blogs! I subscribed to maybe two or three already thanks to it.
]]>A coworker suggested that maybe we should have a standard for french tacos, since many places selling french tacos commit blasphemy by adding veggies in them, sometimes even adding them by default without warning you. I have some experience writing joke RFCs, so that's something to consider.
]]>icbm
XML namespace allows you to specify an ICBM address in either the <channel>
or the <item>
elements, allowing you to relate a location to either the entire RSS feed or a single specific item on that feed.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:icbm="http://postneo.com/icbm"> <channel> <!-- ... --> <icbm:latitude>30.0301</icbm:latitude> <icbm:longitude>32.5776</icbm:longitude> <item> <!-- ... --> <icbm:latitude>31.5077090</icbm:latitude> <icbm:longitude>-82.3115156</icbm:longitude> </item> </channel> </rss>
With this method, you can therefore specify a location where someone may send a nuke if they have been particularly angered by something you published on that feed. Or more commonly, you might want to set a location relevant to the feed, like the location of the tautology club whose blog has a feed for, or the location of something mentioned within the feed.
There are other, more recent and more standard methods to refer to geographic coordinates in an RSS feed, and not just specific points. We will go over those some other time.
]]>icbm
namespace got created in a blog post for RSS 2.0, the Semantic Web Interest Group of the W3C devised a Basic Geo Vocabulary that allows for something very similar to ICBM addresses, but that does not require missiles and is integrated into RDF. It also adds the ability to specify an optional altitude, in meters.
This is meant to be used in RDF, so you would probably normally use this in a RSS 1.0 feed, but as with many other RDF namespaces, nothing really stops you from integrating that into RSS 2.0 or Atom, and many people have done so already.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"> <channel> <!-- ... --> <geo:lat>30.0301</geo:latitude> <geo:long>32.5776</geo:longitude> <item> <!-- ... --> <geo:lat>31.5077090</geo:latitude> <geo:long>-82.3115156</geo:longitude> <!-- It's Moon time. --> <geo:alt>384400000</geo:alt> </item> </channel> </rss>
Two years later, in April 2005, GeoURL.org, a service that used to allow finding websites by their associated geographical location, introduced the geourl
namespace, adding another duplicate namespace on top of icbm
and geo
. I mention it here too because the W3C validator supports all three namespaces!
You can use it with xmlns:geourl="http://geourl.org/rss/module/"
and the <geourl:latitude>
and <geourl:longitude>
elements. I would however advise against using it as it increases the complexity for feed parser and feed reader developers; prefer the RDF geo
namespace instead, which is more widely known.
And as a last piece of advice, do not mix the icbm
, geo
and geourl
namespaces within the same channel or item, even if you intend to represent multiple coordinates at the same time! There are more complex but more flexible alternatives, which we will see in later posts, that allow to go beyond a single point.
GeoRSS is a standard that was developed by a mix of geospatial and syndication people and released in 2006 on georss.org. That website is now gone, but of course, the Internet Archive's got our backs. In 2017, that standard got republished by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the gods of geospatial standards, as OGC 17-002r1. I really like that quote from that version of the standard:
The initial goal for designing and documenting GeoRSS was to keep the encoding of geography on the Web from fracturing into various encodings the way RSS ended up, with multiple similar implementations.
Considering that the three namespaces we saw in the previous post appeared before GeoRSS, and that georss.org mentions the W3C Geo namespace, it doesn't seem like they were starting well. However, the few remaining feeds that I know of that include geospatial information do use GeoRSS only, so I guess they won in the end. The fact that only geospatial experts would be using geospatial coordinates within RSS feeds, and that most GIS software only supports GeoRSS or name all of their RSS support GeoRSS, must have helped.
GeoRSS defines two so-called "serializations", called Simple and GML. In this post, we will only consider GeoRSS Simple; GML requires us to delve deeper into the mess that is geospatial information, so we'll see that at some other point in time. The goal is to have most feed producers, those that are not geospatial experts, use GeoRSS Simple, which is simple enough to be understandable by them, and have geospatial experts use GML, which they probably prefer. You can convert from GeoRSS Simple to GeoRSS GML, but not necessarily the other way around.
Here's an example of yet another way to represent a point in an RSS feed, but using GeoRSS Simple this time:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss/11"> <channel> <!-- ... --> <georss:point>18.5166670 33.6666670</georss:point> <item> <georss:point>18.5166670,33.6666670</georss:point> </item> </channel> </rss>
Where the other namespaces use two distinct tags to represent both coordinates of a point, GeoRSS uses only one tag, which is defined as a list of real numbers. While using one or two tags does not matter much whether you use one form or the other when using GPS coordinates, it does start to matter when you care a lot about altitude or work with other coordinate systems. GeoRSS Simple requires WGS84 (GPS) coordinates and represents elevation separately, so it won't ever matter in this serialization, but with GML, it will!
You may also note that in the first point
, I used a space to separate both coordinates, whereas in the second one I used a comma. The official XSD for GeoRSS Simple defines the point as holding a list of doubles (decimal numbers stored in 8 bytes) using the XSD <xs:list>
element, which defines a list of items as being space-separated only. But section 7.3 of the OGC standard states that a comma is also acceptable, so anyone wishing to parse GeoRSS will have to take that into account.