Monday January 27, 2025; 11:16 AM EST
- This is a post for longtime Scripting News readers. As you know, I've been doing feed readers for a long time. They've been mostly organized around the river of news concept, which also happens to be the way twitter-like systems work. My rivers are built around RSS and formats that interop with RSS. #
Then I got one of the ideas out of the blue that at first didn't make sense, but then the more I thought about the better the idea seemed. It came from Mark Cuban, who liked one of my posts on Bluesky, it was about some FeedLand rivers I had produced, and then I did what I often do -- I offered to do something like that for him. For obvious reasons I don't need to go into here, you all are smart or you wouldn't be reading this. :-)#- Anyway -- he said "I'd use that if it were on Bluesky." #
- My first thought, ridiculous -- can't be done. They have all these limits that aren't present in HTML. I don't have any idea how I could make this work. Here's a screen shot of what a river looks like in FeedLand. #
- But then after a few hours or days, the idea developed, as often happens, and I decided it might work and was worth a try. #
- So I wrote a piece of software that hooked into FeedLand's outbound news flow, and picked out stories from the right feeds, and shot them over to an account on Bluesky. Thanks to Cuban, who linked to it from his million+ follower account, it has 7.6K followers. It uses the list of feeds in my blogroll on Scripting News to feed the river. I think it's a really good pioneering effort, with quite a few followers who are active. And it's going to stay running for the indefinite future. That was in December. #
- Now I've gone a step further, and generalized the code so I can have N of these rivers instead of just one. And to prove it works, I now have two new rivers on Bluesky. #
- dave.feediverse.org -- the Dave tab on my news site. It subscribes to all the RSS feeds I generate. My linkblog, Scripting News, even my YouTube channel which has an RSS feed. Chuck Shotton requested this. It was a good idea so it was the first new river I did on Bluesky. Went on the air just yesterday and now has 10 followers. #
- nba.feediverse.org -- then my project for this morning is to do the same thing for the NBA. I'm a huge Knicks fan, and basically love all of the NBA. People say the Knicks must win a championship, but I say who cares. If they keep playing at this level, with new castmembers all the time, with the track record of current management, I'm a totally happy campter. If we won a championship all the more exciting, but after all those years in the wilderness, it's so nice to finally after all this time to have a great NBA team in NY (and sorry the Nets don't count). Anyway, there's nothing more really to say. If you like basketball, and use Bluesky -- here's what you follow. #
- One more thing -- no federation here folks. It's very simple. No new formats or protocols, built entirely on the tried-and-true RSS and OPML formats for feeds and subscription lists. (And of course support for Atom and RDF too.)#
- I'm glad Mark Cuban asked me to try this path, it provides something I hadn't thought of. Not just inbound feeds for Bluesky, inbound rivers. All we need now is Markdown support, and then a few more things, and we'll be back to where we were in 1997. :-)#
