In 2014 I wrote a piece explaining what a River of News aggregator is. The first qualification is not true in FeedLand. We can handle full text, but it doesn't interfere with scrolling because only the first part is automatically displayed. There's a little downarrow in the lower right corner which reveals the full text if you want to see it. #
Health care companies break rules about preventing identity theft as a routine matter. If you tell them you won't give them your date of birth when they call you, they tell you to stop being difficult.#
You can go almost anywhere. You won't see the features that make it easy to subscribe to a feed, or add to your own personal feed, maybe one or two other things. #
I plan to marry FeedLand to Mastodon via RSS and maybe later ActivityPub. In case you can't tell I love Mastodon. Everything about it so far. Maybe I wish ActivityPub were based on RSS, but I got over that when I saw how nice the software is. That's what really matters, that and interop and not locking users and developers in. #
FeedLand pushes RSS into lots of new places. RSS has been kind of stagnant for a long time. I decide to do something about that at the end of last year. The result is FeedLand.#
PS: Marrying Mastodon does not mean divorcing Twitter. I love Twitter too. People should stop being so chauvinistic about software. Mastodon will never be Twitter and vice versa. Each are their own thing. What matters is the people. #
The more I learn about Mastodon, the more impressed I am. It's a very nicely done piece of software. And unlike Twitter, they have RSS feeds for every user. Just add a .rss to the end of the URL and you get a nice feed, like this. When I look at the feed I see something someone put some love into. Or if it was a team, they worked well as a team. #
I do have a couple of suggestions to make, based on experience providing these feeds basically in all the software I do. #
Please give the user a way to change the channel-level title and description for the feed. The reason — my feed doesn’t say it’s from my Mastodon account, so when an update shows up in FeedLand it’s missing that context. The user has a better idea of the context for the feed, how many other feeds they have and how this one relates to those feeds. #
There also is a simple instant notification protocol in RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. I’d be happy to show you how to turn it on. Would increase immediacy of updates.#
There’s a simple way to link the feed to an account on Twitter, Facebook, etc. we should add one for Masto as well. I started a thread for this. #
I've started a discussion thread for this topic here. I'd love to work with the people who do this part of Mastodon to make this feature even better than it already is.#
PS: Here's what my Mastodon feed looks like as a river in FeedLand and as a mailbox. #
Last update: Thursday November 17, 2022; 9:26 AM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
