Blog-feed extension

[erlend-sh]

By default, Weird will assume that blogs live externally.

They can be plugged in by RSS feed, featured as article summaries that link out to the source material, or completely imported (regenerated and canonically linked outward if the ‘local copy’ is not supposed to be the official one).

Some great prior art from @jonbell-lot23 here: Hey Creators, Please Make Firehoses! – the latest iteration of that is rssblend:

as an author, do you want one feed that has all your stuff? Sure, that’s sort of cool. But again, the ability to say “here’s my art feed from 5 sources” and have that be different from “here’s my politics feed from 2 sources” is a good thing.

It shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be filtered and curated.

So I’ve been building a drop dead simple rss blender tool. Give me x number of feeds, I’ll combine them. Give me a few things to blacklist, I’ll remove those items.

Imagine that being super simple to do. Go to this service. Pull some stuff together into a custom webpage/rss/activitypub/weekly email

A similar but more source-agnostic approach is exemplified in https://github.com/Lissy93/my-website by @Lissy93 and it checks a lot of boxes for us, so that's another great reference.

🆕 There’s also this anyblog-importer:

• https://github.com/muchdogesec/history4feed
• https://www.dogesec.com/blog/full_text_rss_atom_blog_feeds/

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Some users will want their own blog running on Weird itself. All of the above combined with Iroh could be a little bit like https://www.planetable.xyz/

Related:

• https://github.com/muni-town/weird/discussions/217

• 8

• https://github.com/commune-os/weird/discussions/14

[zicklag]

Combined with Iroh, it’d be a little bit like https://www.planetable.xyz/

There's actually a chance we could do the cloud hosting for people, though I'm not totally sure if we could offer competitive prices or if it'd be worth the cost for us. It might be cost effective for us, if we do static sites that can be cached with cloudflare to lower our server load.

Iroh does basically let us easily build a globally distributed CDN, with minimal effort, and we could make a very nice experience for publishing your sites to our Weird hosting.

[erlend-sh]

Similar idea here:

https://lordajax.com/post/Introducing-JSON-Blog https://github.com/jsonblog/jsonblog-generator-boilerplate

[zicklag]

If we get WASM renderers for user domains, which really isn't that hard at all to create an MVP for, then it would be very possible to allow you to just upload your blog JSON to Weird for rendering.

[erlend-sh]

What about WASM makes that more doable than it would be with the regular web stack?

[zicklag]

It wouldn't make it more doable per-se, but if we had WASM support for profile pages, then it'd be easy to make highly-focused renderers for specific use cases, such as JSON-blog, without having to pre-bake support for them all into Weird proper.