use-feeds.7 (4683B) [raw]
1 .Dd February 9, 2021 2 .Dt USE-FEEDS 7 3 .Os 4 .Sh NAME 5 .Nm use-feeds 6 .Nd RSS/Atom feeds; what are they and why you should care 7 .Sh SYNOPSIS 8 .Bd -literal -offset indent 9 Feed the birds 10 Tuppence, a bag 11 ~ Mary Poppins 12 .Ed 13 .Sh DESCRIPTION 14 I've always wanted this site to be an homage to tech that I 15 enjoy using, and recently, that's included old-school RSS/Atom feeds. 16 However, up until now, I had only been a feed consumer 17 and had never produced my own. 18 So, this past weekend I decided to hunker down and read enough 19 of the spec to generate one for this site. 20 .Pp 21 But let's back up \(em what is a feed? Why should you care? 22 .Pp 23 A feed is simply a standardized listing of items a source 24 (blog, vlog, newspaper, etc) has generated recently. 25 Users then consume multiple feeds to get centralized notifications 26 on new content. 27 Think "following" on social media, but generalized for any content 28 accessible on the web. 29 .Pp 30 The most important feature of a feed is that it has been standardized 31 and is not controlled by any individual corporation. 32 This ensures that users are not only free from vendor lock-in, but 33 it also allows for an increasingly diverse set of clients and sources. 34 .Pp 35 For example, there are clients ranging from FOSS text only terminal 36 clients like 37 .Xr newsboat 1 38 to commercial apps like 39 .Lk https://feedly.com Feedly . 40 And despite being drastically different UI's, their purpose is the same: 41 allow you to subscribe to any number of feeds, and centralize your 42 notifications. 43 .Pp 44 The idea is simple, but it's transformed the way I interact with the 45 web. 46 It saves me time in not browsing the infinite scroll that has 47 become social media, and it allows me to stay up to date with smaller 48 blogs that don't post frequently (cough, like yours truly, cough). 49 .Pp 50 Consider a new blog post on this site. 51 Without a feed, you'd have to periodically check my 52 .Xr blog 7 53 for updates 54 or hear about it through some other link aggregation or social media 55 site (Hackernews, Reddit, etc). 56 Adding a feed allows those who want to follow to get notifications, without 57 checking other locations or having to waste time checking back periodically. 58 .Pp 59 So if you haven't tried a feed reader ever, go find one that suits 60 your fancy and give it a try! 61 In an era where user upvoted content reigns king (Reddit, Facebook, etc), 62 it's really empowering as a user to decide 63 .Em what 64 you see updates for and to be able to check them on your own time. 65 And if you're a publisher of any content, consider creating a feed for 66 others to follow. 67 I'll certainly appreciate it! 68 .Pp 69 It's never too late to take control of your digital habits, 70 and using a feed reader is a good place to start. 71 .Sh IMPLEMENTATION 72 If you read this far, I thought you might also be interested in hearing 73 not only the what and the why but also the 74 .Em how . 75 .Pp 76 Due to the recent migration to using 77 .Xr mdoc 7 78 as the markup for this site (detailed in 79 .Xr my-old-man 7 ) , 80 I knew that finding an off-the-shelf feed generator would be unlikely. 81 Plus, with my general desire to keep the site build-able by base OpenBSD, 82 I figured it was as good an excuse as any to read the spec and generate 83 it myself. 84 .Pp 85 I ended up choosing Atom over RSS mostly based on some online opinions 86 that it is a stricter standard, but I can't say much to back that up. 87 What I can say is that after the initial confusion of how to escape the 88 embedded HTML in the XML feed, it was pretty smooth sailing. 89 .Pp 90 The full implementation is in 91 .Lk https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com/file/bin/genatom.sh.html genatom.sh 92 and basically boils down to: 93 .Pp 94 .Bl -enum -compact 95 .It 96 .Xr grep 1 97 call through the 98 .Em blog.7 99 file to get a list of entries and their dates 100 .It 101 Print the header of the XML (with newest date from 1.) 102 .It 103 For each item in entries, add the XML entry along with the content 104 as generated by 105 .Xr mandoc 1 106 with the 107 .Fl O Ar fragment 108 option. 109 This ensures the "notification" has the full post \(em 110 users never even need to visit the site! 111 .It 112 End by printing the footer of the XML 113 .El 114 .Pp 115 And that's it! 116 The only real trick was to use 117 .Lk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA CDATA 118 sections around the entry content in the XML to escape the HTML tags. 119 .Pp 120 And of course, like everything else in this blog, it rebuilds on git-push 121 via a call to 122 .Xr make 1 . 123 See the 124 .Lk https://git.alexkarle.com/alexkarle.com/file/Makefile.html Makefile 125 for the recipe. 126 .Sh SEE ALSO 127 .Bl -bullet -compact 128 .It 129 .Xr blog 7 130 .It 131 My Atom feed: 132 .Lk https://alexkarle.com/atom.xml 133 .It 134 Wiki page on Atom: 135 .Lk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) 136 .It 137 Atom RFC: 138 .Lk https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 139 .It 140 Related advocacy: 141 .Lk https://atthis.link/blog/2021/rss.html 142 .El