Day 1 questions & comments

[scripting]

After a very successful Day 0 (thank you!) I'm about to send out the first email to the initial group. I'm pointing to this thread from the email. If you have any questions or comments, this is the place! 👍

[kevinctofel]

Followed the steps from your email on a Linux machine (Pop OS! distro) and everything is working as you described @scripting. Looks great so far!

I really appreciate the ability to see who else is subscribed to a feed and to see what feeds they follow. Of course, I added my Chromebook site's feed, just to see how it looked (and to make sure my feed was still valid & good). ;) Fantastic!

I'll spend more time with this product later tonight and/or tomorrow morning as time allows. Well done!

[mistersugar]

I appreciate the ability to sort feeds by Title, When, or count.

I can already see how frustrating it could be that feed titles (like my own Yumi Stap Storian) often don't explain or match what the feed is about. I suppose that could lead to a potential strength of the community -- as I get to know others and trust their judgment or understand their interests, I'll be inclined to click a feed, scan the latest posts, and discover feeds I want to read regularly. This reminds me of our blog carnivals back in the early 2000s. (I look forward to the ability to add a link to my Radio3 link blog, too.)

I had a hard time remembering how to locally save the XML list as a backup, but I was successful in that, and even was able to open the downloaded file in Electric Drummer and see the feeds as expected.

[scripting]

@kevinctofel, @mistersugar -- thanks for the comments.

Anton -- yes, when viewing feeds this way the lack of good descriptions is more visible. How do I know what Daring Fireball is about? Nice name, but what is it about?

One thing I'm hoping we'll be able to develop and maintain collections of feeds like the ones for

1. nbariver.com

2. guardian.newsriver.org and nytimesriver.com

3. mlbriver.com

4. podcatch.com

I could see Kevin managing a specialized river of news about Chromebooks. It would help him do the work for his publication, as well as be a resource for his subscribers. I've always felt news orgs should maintain rivers.

[scripting]

An unsolved problem -- how to tell that two different URLs are actually the same feed?

I know the Atom rel="self" element is an attempt to solve that problem, and it is fairly widely supported because the public feed validator, written by one of the Atom guys kind of requires it (if you look closely it doesn't, but people miss that).

The first interesting case study is Daring Fireball which seems to have more than one URL in circulation here.

Also perhaps a way to have a discussion about feeds the way Wikipedia pages have discussion. (attn @mistersugar).

Also I should mention if you want a look under the hood (esp @kevinctofel) FeedLand runs on top of reallySimple feed parser.

So if you want to see the info that's available to FeedLand, just look there.

You can test it out with a feed by going to the feeder app (I know this is confusing):

http://feeder.scripting.com/returnjson?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fscripting.com%2Frss.xml

That shows the JSON structure we get when we read a feed.

[gwthompson]

I came across a scrolling issue in the right pane when viewing a feed. If the feed has "foldable" headings in an article and the content is long you can't scroll to the bottom when the entire content isn't visible. This is evident in the scripting.com feed for the article "A screed of importance" and also in Ken Smith's feed in the article "Murals and City Planning".

Here are the steps I took:

1. In Chrome drag the right side of the browser over until you see 1200 +/- as the width. In my case it was 1200 x 926 which is shown at the top right of the page when dragging the right edge of the browser .
2. Load either one of the feeds mentioned above to see the problem.

I have another feed in my list for Real Python to use for comparison which has a lot of long content. The issue doesn't appear so I'm assuming it has something to do with the "foldable" headings.

I also tested this in Safari and got the same results.

[scripting]

New sub-menu of the Testing menu. Each item takes you to the feedlist of one of the early testers.

Note: I don't imagine this list will be kept up to date indefinitely -- the idea is to have other systems that help surface the active users.

[scripting]

@gwthompson -- those are stories from sites written in Drummer and rendered by Old School.

I checked it out with sites like Ken's and mine that are of that type, and others that are not.

And I saw the same thing you did.

The workaround for now is to collapse one of the items if you can to make vertical room, or make the window taller.

There will be lots of things like this btw. Some of these things won't make it into the final product. It's not a priority at this point to fix these kinds of problems.

[gwthompson]

@scripting -- Completely understand! I'm using Drummer to track my notes as I test and figured I would mention it.

[scripting]

@gwthompson -- i've recorded a voicemail to the group about where this project is at...

it's unusual, it's a bit like traveling back to 2002, and considering the RSS world as it exists now, and try to do something with the incredible amount of data flowing by.

i have a lot of ideas about information viewers for this stuff. i remember a long time ago when i worked at a timesharing company. we had a big computer facility in new jersey and i worked in manhattan. we leased our customers teletypes where they would type queries and we're send back data. they could also program in basic. my job was to write tools for them so they would run them and use them for hours and of course very hour was money to my company, so i was incentivized to come up with things they'd use a lot.

(this is obviously a blog post)

Anyway the most fun I had was writing a scroller of headlines from an AP wire we had hooked up to the system. You'd just leave the app running and it would just show you the news as it happened. people got addicted to it. Really simple. No one says it has to be complex to work. :smile:

[scripting]

PS: I'll put the voicemail in the nightly email.

[scripting]

I just wrote a query for what will become the hotlist, here are the results in a screen shot.

[scripting]

Today's email just went out.