Friday, June 19, 2015 at 1:25 PM

riverBrowser open source release

Rivers are very important structures in my 2015 world, as it's shaping up.

They appear on the home pages of Scripting News, Podcatch.com. Subsets of rivers are on every page rendered by Liveblog.

Rivers are not only important here, but they also form the central structures of Twitter and Facebook.

Doing a good job of generating and viewing rivers is a pretty big deal. However, until now my work in this area was not organized. This open source release in an attempt to add organization.

GitHub repo

Here's a link to the GitHub repository for riverBrowser.

The readme explains how to call its main routine, httpGetRiver.

Sites that use this toolkit

I've converted most of my river sites to use the new toolkit, including:

  1. Scripting News

  2. Podcatch

  3. TechBlast (a new site for tech news)

  4. Radio's Rivers (my original collection of rivers)

The other side

Rivers are an open format, defined by the spec on riverjs.org.

River4, a Node.js aggregator that's also open source, generates rivers.

Still to-do

The rivers that are integrated in River4 have not yet been updated. I wanted to give the community a chance to review the implementation here, and try it out on their own rivers, before taking a chance on breaking people's installations. So this review is important if you want a relatively breakage-free update.


Last built: Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:05 AM

By Dave Winer, Friday, June 19, 2015 at 1:25 PM. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.