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scripting / feedToMasto

Node app that checks a list of feeds periodically, post new items to Mastodon.
MIT License
26 stars 0 forks source link

0.4.4 working well #2

Open waltwooton opened 1 year ago

waltwooton commented 1 year ago

Installed 0.4.4 and it works well.

The Mastodon feed is here:

https://social.spartanburg/@scnews

Seeing entity names and numbers. Greenville Online (feedblitz) uses &#160 and &nbsp between items.

Also seeing nothing but ESOCKETTIMEOUT errors from The State (Columbia, SC). I've given up on them for the moment.

These are minor things, though. All is well otherwise,.

waltwooton commented 1 year ago

Some observations on flServerSupportsMarkdown:

1) Whether that is set to true or false, the h3 markdown before the title, '###', is not recognized in Mastodon . I've commented it out in feedToMasto.js. This puzzles me because I do not see it in @dave@social.masto.land.

2) Setting flServerSupportsMarkdown to false causes a lot of HTML tags to appear in some feeds because they are written into the RSS feeds within ![CDATA[] blocks. See, for instance, https://www.counton2.com/feed/. Seems sketchy to me, but, you know, humans.

waltwooton commented 1 year ago

I see that there's a request in the Mastodon github to allow importing Markdown.

Setting flServerSupportsMarkdown to true somehow removes the HTML tags, and that is the behavior I endorse.

scripting commented 1 year ago

This kind of review is most helpful. Keep going. ;-)

waltwooton commented 1 year ago

I've written a function to replace the HTML entities in the CDATA blocks. Probably not much demand for that, but I've archived it here for anyone interested: https://github.com/waltwooton/convertEntities.

Of greater interest I think, is a function to filter nodes based on keywords in the Description, Author, or Category fields. The RSS feeds of most media outlets include a lot of clickbait and world/national stories that don't suit my purpose of a feed of South Carolina news. I suspect this might be of some interest to others. The description and author filters are working fine, but I can't find category after looking upstream to feedread.js, which defines categories in head, but maybe not in item? Guidance on categories would be appreciated. The current code is here: https://github.com/waltwooton/RSSfilter.

Anyway, feedToMasto is still cranking along as intended, and the @scnews account it feeds has even attracted some followers without any promotion. Very useful app.

waltwooton commented 1 year ago

Hit the config.maxGuids overnight and feedToMasto stopped outputting posts. Each pass of deleteOldestGuid output 'ct == 1' or 'ct -- 2'. I renamed status.json and it was recreated and the feed continued as before. Will troubleshoot further when I have time.