RSRSSS

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 07:40:36 +0000

Nothing better to start off an RSS feed about RSS feeds than to make itself its first item.

Who needs HTML anyway?

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 07:40:22 +0000

I added an XSLT stylesheet 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.

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?

Regular Flolloping

Fri, 1 Jan 2021 11:04:02 +0000

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.

javapool updates

Sat, 9 Jan 2021 17:02:51 +0000

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 a town wiki page if you want to learn about the lore.

Things of Interest

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 17:15:11 +0000

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.

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.

Replacing Yahoo with TinyTinyRSS in Pale Moon

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 21:11:31 +0000

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 the current management at Mozilla. 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.

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…

disable-output-escaping

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 21:40:04 +0000

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 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:

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.