Rivers

[scripting]

Today is a big day for new features in FeedLand.

A new checkbox in Settings

There's a new option in the Testing panel in the Settings command (in the System menu, at the right edge of the menu bar).

It's a checkbox that tells FeedLand to use the river-style reader in place of the maiblox-style reader.

If it's checked, when you click on the name of a feed in the feedlist, the items will open in a reverse-chronologic list of items.

Only deal-stopper bug reports for now

Lots of never-seen-before features in rivers, and for the most -- they work. You will see bugs. This is 100 percent new software, never been used by anyone but me, but for now, try to ignore all the bugs that don't prevent you from using the system. Those I need to know about when you're ready to report. But otherwise, focus on exploring the functionality.

A non-feed-specific river

There's a new command in the menu, VIew My News. It opens a river of all your feeds in reverse-chronologic order. This is available even if you've chosen to use the mailbox-style reader.

In the next section I'll list some of the features you should look out for.

BTW, there's more to come. This is not the end of new features. :smile:

Some of the new features

• Rivers update in real time as new items are discovered by the FeedLand server.

• If an item is too long it's truncated, and a MORE element shows up. If you click it, you'll see the rest of the item, and a LESS element shows up.

• There's a Like icon on each item. It works. It still needs some more features to be fully useful.

• There is an enclosure icon for each item, it's enabled if the item actually has an enclosure.

• The Share icon is a placeholder, the functionality is not implemented at this time.

• The time in the lower right corner is also a permalink to the item on the source's website.

I'm sure I forgot to list some important features. :-)

Newsboxes

They now only show up at the top of these pages feedlist pages and the hotlist.

[kevinctofel]

River view looks good so far! My blog feed is a full feed and I can verify that the MORE element is working as well. I was able to Like a story (and un-Like it!) too. 👏

I also see the enclosure icon (headphones) in the NASA image of the Day. Clicking the icon shows the image, as expected. (I misread the above and thought I'd just see the image in the river, so removed my report of "no image shown) - working as intended!

[scripting]

Kevin, I’m glad it works, I did specifically ask for no bug reports unless it’s a deal-stopper. Let me enjoy the day.

Also there’s lots of investigating you can do without bringing it to me. The answer is in their feed.

[scripting]

If you're reporting a problem with a feed, include the URL.

[scripting]

A side-note -- we're going to be learning a lot about how feeds work, and how their implementors struggle to figure out what to do and often come up with an answer that's puzzling, or designed for interop with apps we know nothing about.

One thing that will be important as we go forward is seeing how other feed readers deal with issues.

Kevin reported a problem today with the way FeedLand was displaying a certain feed. Well, how do other feed readers deal with it? I don't have that expertise, but the apps are there to discover. I'm a big believer in prior art. Reports like this must be researched.

On the other hand some things feed readers do are disgusting. Like Feedly displaying an element from Scripting News as [no title]. That's it. There is a description. They could use the first N characters from that, but instead they punish readers of my feed. People who use their product. I decided in 2017 that I wasn't going to work around what amount to political statements from feed readers like Feedly,. They think they're the new Google Reader. I did try to play by Google Reader's rules. And each time I gave into them (and Facebook and Twitter, Medium) blogging lost some of its value for me. Until 2017 when I blew the whole thing up. You can read about it in my blog in April and May of that year, and the months leading up to it. 2017 was a big year for me. It led to all that I'm doing now. I have the same attitude about RSS today. I don't care about the norms that have whittled feeds down to nothing. If a feed follows the rules of RSS but a feed reader chokes on it, they should fix the reader.

Anyway. One way to include an image in a feed is to use the HTML img element inside a description sub-element of item. That's probably the only reliable way to do it. If NASA doesn't do it that way, my guess is that NONE of the readers will show you the images, not just FeedLand.

For discussions like this, which are valuable, start a new thread. This thread is for deal-stoppers with the new stuff, and btw -- kudos are important too. I really like to hear when people like my work. It really is one of the reasons I do this stuff. To make other people feel good and be excited.

Sorry for typos in this post. The text is very small and my vision is pretty bad. ;-)

[troutcolor]

Hi Dave, I've been biting my tongue to avoid asking for a river view. The time link too. Great stuff thanks.

Oh the ellipsis -> data 💯

[gwthompson]

I have been playing with the river view and it is so cool!! And then I realized what the enclosure icon does and so I added a couple of podcast RSS feeds and bam!!! I have podcasts mixed in with my news feed!! I am actually getting goosebumps with the potential of Feedland and how RSS can be integrated with all types of information! I have been using RSS and podcasts for years and I have become somewhat numb to how RSS and podcasts have been so commercialized! I'm having trouble find the right words!! Now I'm going to look at how I can generate RSS feeds for some of my sensors I use with my Raspberry Pis and integrate it all through Feedland!! And once APIs evolve Feedland can become my hub for virtually all of the information I ingest on a daily basis!

If anyone is interested the two podcast feeds I have just added are The Daily Beans and Self-Hosted. This is so cool!!!

Brilliant work Dave!!!

[scripting]

I fixed a problem in the Like function. Now when you hover the mouse over a thumb icon, if the count of likes is greater than zero, a popup appears showing the people who have liked the item.

This was broken in some integration work I did.

[scripting]

Thank you @troutcolor, @gwthompson -- this has been a difficult day, mostly for things having nothing to do with this project.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better. :smile:

[gwthompson]

I have been using this new feature a lot the last 24 hours or so mostly in Chrome on my Mac. I decide to take a look on my iPad Pro and discovered that the items that have More are not actually hiding the overflow and the text all runs together. So I took a look at Safari on my Mac and it's doing the same thing. I opened the inspector and found that in the riverviewer.css file the class .divRiverItemBody is using overflow:clip and apparently Safari doesn't support it yet. I made a temporary change to overflow:hidden and it cleaned up the overflow.

Not a deal breaker as I can use Chrome on my Mac but thought I'd put it here for posterity.

[scripting]

@gwthompson -- thanks for this report. I just made the change, and the MORE button now seems to work properly in Safari.

It also appears to still work correctly in Chrome.

[gwthompson]

@scripting -- I also checked Firefox and it is working correctly as well. Thanks!

[gwthompson]

Additionally I checked both my iPad Pro 12.9" and 11" and Feedland is now working perfectly! :)