Gregory's ServerI made a thing to help me find RSS feeds, and I really liked it. So I made it prettier so you can use it too, if RSS feeds are your thing.
As it turns out, in my corner of the fediverse there’s a ton of them…
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129 comments
  @paulcuth Very cool, thank you! Always looking for more RSS discovery. I'm also trying to make RSS more findable/accessible: @paulcuth Worked well with my profile! Thanks for making this. https://rss-is-dead.lol/user?profileUrl=https%3A%2F%2Findieweb.social%2Fusers%2Fjohanbove @johanbove Yeah, it was a bit odd for folks with private following lists ☹️ I've added some text that hopefully helps, but definitely still a better experience when there's connections to navigate.   @paulcuth "Could not fetch ActivityPub profile: Unexpected token '<'," (From my Hubzilla account, @fentiger@zotum.net)   Anyone want to explain the attraction of using mastodon as an RSS reader, which I assume is the point of this post? I think there are more efficient models and platforms for reading RSS feeds. FINDING them may indeed be harder. Many former feeds became siloed paywalls. Still not sure I want to fold rss in into a mastodon thread. I already click thru to too many individual articles that would be much more quickly read just visiting the source site directly. @Chancerubbage Hi 👋 The aim is to address that discovery issue... you can quickly see which of your connections have RSS feeds, view a preview of those feeds, and then subscribe by opening the page in your usual feed reader app. I wanted to find feeds closer to home; it's not really meant to be a reader. I certainly could do a better job of explaining that on the site. //cc @mastodonmigration Oh that sounds cool. So if someone you follow on Mastodon, that is basically just bot posts of headlines on a news site for example, you can enter their screename there and see if there is an associated RSS feed? Sometimes they don’t even drop website info in their bio. Oops, it is your OWN screename you enter. Is it all on the instance, or just those you follow (I haven’t gotten into my noggin how local ‘local’ is yet)  @paulcuth @Chancerubbage @mastodonmigration how does your tool learn what RSS feeds a person has? @schizanon @paulcuth @mastodonmigration I don’t know if it is account level or server level. But input is at account. Granularity. Local could mean either afaik. Theoretically you’d index who in the instance has an RSS feed- it could already being ‘fed’ into Mastodon, at least indirectly. Then cross index. You may be asking about more than theoretical mechanics however @schizanon @paulcuth @mastodonmigration Not every website in the world has accesssible Really Simple Syndication hooks. These days you often hear it only known by some primarily as a way to deliver podcasts. Not always kind to someone’s web metrics. @schizanon @paulcuth @mastodonmigration I’m thinking profile links, just to keep the total number of rss cross references within a manageable framework. The site may be just using those that the input screename is following, and not looking further. I’m only taking a wild ass guess as to what theoretically could be feasible. Some mastodon users definitely want mastodon as a sort of everything app, combo rss reader and video and audio. Some might only want microblogging paradigm. I’ve no idea.  @jamesbritt Oh, this is good feedback; It's totally not obvious when there's no one in your following list (I assume your following list is set to private?). When your connections are displayed, it highlights which of them have links in their profile to pages with RSS feeds. And you can navigate around the graph to find more. I'll have to add something to explain this in these cases. In the meantime, you could try starting with the handle of someone you follow? Thanks for this feedback 🙏 @paulcuth, I could kiss you! This tool was something I’d put on my “Someday/Maybe” list, but you’ve done it for me. Thank you so much! @paulcuth, I love it! I did have a feature, but I wanted to avoid being that guy asking for unsolicited features. What do you think about exporting all the RSS feeds to an OPML file? Folks could then import all those feeds into their feed reader of choice in one fell swoop. @paulcuth @astro_jcm the NUMBER of people on here who have asked me if I have an RSS feed for my space newsletter (I do!) and also I use RSS myself. Thank you!!   @paulcuth @KevinMarks I think we have have killed it; I’m just getting “internal server error” when I stick in my handle. @paulcuth @KevinMarks Oh, interesting, it just doesn’t like me specifically for some reason! 🤣 When I try with someone else’s handle I get the expected results. @paulcuth I *think* it’s an instance-wide problem? I haven’t found a pdx.social one that doesn’t produce that error so far. @paulcuth@mastodon.social It just brings me to a page with my profile. Is it supposed to do something else? @thesteelrat I've fixed a couple of things that were causing this error; you might find it works now. 🙂  @paulcuth it seems to return "Internal Server Error" if you have trailing space after the fedi handle. it worked when I removed it    @paulcuth Hi! I noticed your crawler gets a 406 Not Acceptable status from my site – probably because it sends requests with    @paulcuth @KevinMarks i've recently fallen in love with RSS again, so I'm really happy to see that something like this exists. Thanks for making it!  @paulcuth Very cool! A feature request: I'd love to get an OPML¹ file of all the RSS feeds of the people I follow, then I could import it into NetNewsWire² 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML  @paulcuth Love it! I accidentally included a space at the end of my handle the first time I tried it, and it caused an internal server error. I removed the space, and everything worked perfectly. I'm working on my own RSS reader, and this will come in super handy!  @paulcuth Great job! If it helps, here's the GtS API documentation: https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/api/swagger/ Should be mostly the same as Mastodon, but it does often require authentication for paths Mastodon doesn't, so maybe that's the issue?    @paulcuth this is definitely going to find me some more feeds to throw into another .lol domain, my https://rs.sjoy.lol - thank you!  @paulcuth Trying to use this product - the discovery is brilliant, but you appear to be making copies of everyone’s RSS feed and adding your branding to them. And this, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. Why are you doing that? Please stop doing that. @paulcuth But if I follow that feed according to your instructions, it adds your branding to the title, and it goes through your server. I don’t want your server between me and my readers. How about a “copy this address” dialog? @paulcuth I was literally asking for something like this a couple of weeks ago. Thank you! @paulcuth After compared the `<link>` tag from my blog to others being detected/presented, I noticed that I had the `type` attribute defined to `xml` and changed it to `rss+xml`. It took a few minutes to show correctly on your site. I presume you're caching the profiles. Thanks again for taking the time to build this tool.  @paulcuth @paulcuth looks about right, well done! i love that you can simply click on a feed to see the updates, no signup necessary. wonderful paths to discovery 👍🏽☀️ @paulcuth some ux suggestions: 1. maybe add the @ prefix if someone forgets or let people paste in their profile urls. more work for you, but makes reduces form errors. 2. perhaps link to the front page or some kind of blurb of what this is on the profile pages, as someone might arrive there from a link and not realize they can plug in their profile and see what's there (kind of feels like a linktree the way it is) https://rss-is-dead.lol/user?profileUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.online%2Fusers%2Frosano  @paulcuth Hey Paul, really love the site but I’m a bit confused by the decision to proxy all feeds through the site rather than setting the original feed in the head to be picked up by feed readers (and adding “rss is dead lol” to the title). It worries me that it’s another step and possible failure point if someone subscribes to my feed that way. @paulcuth Also (and this falls into the failure point I mentioned) subscribing to my feed this way doesn’t work and shows nothing. Someone might subscribe and assume they’ll get new posts but they won’t. Feed example https://rss-is-dead.lol/feed/?url=https%3A%2F%2Frknight.me%2Fsubscribe%2Fposts%2Fatom.xml @robb Hi Robb 👋 It looks like some readers display the page title in the "Subscribe to feed?" prompt, rather than the feed title. They seem to use the feed title once subscribed, but I agree it's confusing. I've now removed the site title from the page, so hopefully that will help. (Pages are cached for an hour, so you may still see it for a little bit.) @robb As for proxying the feed, there's a few reasons I thought it might be better… Some blogs have quite verbose index pages, and what I really wanted was to get a quick overview of what to expect in the feed, if I were to subscribe. Some feeds don't link to the blog index, and some don't link to pages that link back to the feed, which can be slow and an awkward experience. @paulcuth Also fwiw, I like the proxied overview pages. Because of the NNW issue, I wrongly thought the whole feed was proxied. @paulcuth Apologies - you are doing exactly what I thought (in my tired state I must have looked at it wrong). I think what's happening is NetNewsWire isn't looking for a feed because the URL ends with .xml And apologies for the title thing, again I think this might be a NNW issue not looking for the actual feed. @paulcuth Aren't we all 😅 I'm not sure how to get around this - I tried with additional query strings on the end but it still picks up the page as a feed but NNW is pretty popular on iOS/Mac so it'd be good to come up with something. Obviously I have no idea how the site works but I'm thinking encoding the feed URL with base64 or something would fix it because the it wouldn't end with “.xml” @paulcuth Neat! And now I need to figure out why it’s not picking up the RSS feed from my blog. @paulcuth this is great! is the source code available to view? I'm curious how Enhance works. @paulcuth What a cool tool, thanks! I noticed the HTTPS certificate has some issues maybe?  @paulcuth This is amazing! I have a feature proposal: add an OPML export feature, so you can easily follow them all: http://opml.org/spec2.opml#subscriptionLists.  @paulcuth love this!! super helpful in finding RSS feeds for a lot of sites i follow on fedi @paulcuth this is awesome. Would it be possible to get an opml export of the feeds so I can import them in to my reader?   @paulcuth This is really cool! Sorry if I am dumb but it seems there is no simple way of copy & pasting the feed URL so that I can add it to my RSS reader?  @paulcuth @paulcuth I love it! Great idea. A small potential improvement, it couldn’t find the default rss/atom feed of flickr and GitHub. Not sure if it’s bug or something else. @paulcuth This is an absolutely amazing idea and a cool implementation. I regret I can only boost it once.  |
@paulcuth This is cool! I love it!!