7 ms·

Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader

101 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

miduil 2y ago
Great part is you can also style the rss feeds with with `.css` https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xsl https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-...
- joneil 2y ago
  I never realised this - thanks! It feels like by adding styling I could make those who click on the “feed” link, but don’t yet know what RSS is have a much better experience than seeing unstyled XML and being confused.
- genmon 2y ago
  thanks for sharing! I also run https://www.aboutfeeds.com https://www.aboutfeeds.com which is a simple "explainer" for those new to RSS the limitation of feed styling is that it requires custom http headers: Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8 # not application/rss+xml x-content-type-options: nosniff and so it doesn't work on GitHub Pages, which is otherwise my go-to for building + hosting static sites. so... if anyone from GitHub is reading this, please make it possible to tweak the page headers! (and if you know anyone there, please pass on this request :)
  - arccy 2y ago
    or you can use XSLT, no headers required https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3770-using-xslt-and-xml-transformations-to-style-my-blogs-rss-feed-as-an-html-page.htm https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3770-using-xslt-and-xml-transf...
bayindirh 2y ago
This is the same as tdarb.org's "Shinobi Website" phase[0]. For more information see [1]. Sadly, tdarb.org is dead, but the HN link[1] is not. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220523124655/https://tdarb.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220523124655/https://tdarb.org... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372373
javajosh 2y ago
I guess its time to make a blog that's only available to read through ssh now.
- bovermyer 2y ago
  Nothing's stopping you. Or you could just run a blog on the Gemini protocol. Either is fine.
- hyperorca 2y ago
  You can even start selling coffee there, while you're at it.
  - sujayk_33 2y ago
    someone's already doing that LoL
    - tentacleuno 2y ago
      https://terminal.shop https://terminal.shop :)
    - pedrogpimenta 2y ago
      that's the joke
- wffurr 2y ago
  Do you mean a .plan and .project file for finger?
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Go mTLS, go hardcore.
- anthk 2y ago
  SDF has blogs over gopher:// gopher://sdf.org/1/phlogs And often, if not usually, or always, the gopher content outmatches the web sites as maintaing a gopher blog it's dead easy compared to the web. No styles, you can post via a script, images would just placed as a link in the end, or under an images/ directory to be read later.
codetiger 2y ago
BYOF - Bring your own frontend
- flir 2y ago
  That sounds a lot more fun than Gemini, tbh.
Waterluvian 2y ago
It’s basically just an API then?
- PurpleRamen 2y ago
  It's delivered in HTML embedded in XML, instead of pure HTML or some JavaScript/HTML-shenanigan. Not really an API.
- Gormo 2y ago
  No, it's just an Atom feed, with no corresponding HTML page. No APIs are really involved.
superkuh 2y ago
There was a military analysis site with free and paid versions. For 7 years running if you subscribed to the RSS feed you received the full paid content in the feeds for free. It was great. Eventually enough people must have been clicking "paid" links to paid resources (pdfs, images, etc) in the feed content that they noticed and stopped providing full post content in RSS (for free and paid).
lasermike026 2y ago
This works.
kwhitefoot 2y ago
Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write. Doesn't this make it worse?
- xandrius 2y ago
  I guess the situation is so bad that a gimmick like this might actually help.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    I have a lot of feeds in my reader, but I don't add feeds without first seeing the content on the Web. This gimmick is nothing special to me. For someone who doesn't use feeds, I doubt they would start doing so for a mystery meat blog.
    - nazgulsenpai 2y ago
      I imagine the author has baked in that people who don't use feeds won't use a blog that requires it be read as a feed.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  It absolutely does. I can't share a link to a post, so spreading the word about the blog's existence is pretty hard.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  That's only a problem if your goal is to be read by as many people as possible.
  - Closi 2y ago
    Or if your goal is that interested parties can find and access it easily. Otherwise why make it a blog and not just a private document?
    - 2y ago
PurpleRamen 2y ago
Curious which impact this will have on the web-crawler. Will they ignore it? Will they push it, as they have subscribed themselves to the feed? Or will they experience a divide by zero-situation and go bonkers?
- kevincox 2y ago
  Many web crawlers (including Google IIUC) will subscribe to the feeds. But I think they just use it as a way to efficiently discover new pages rather than directly surfacing the results in search. So likely since the posts don't have a web URL they won't appear in search results.
Retr0id 2y ago
> I'm sorry about using a non-spec compliant ID on the entries, but there are no URLs for blog posts to set it to. Assuming they're just arbitrary IDs, using urn:uuid: might be a more compliant version of the same idea https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bis-00.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bi...
- kevincox 2y ago
  The URLs also don't need to exist as an HTML webpage. They just need to be unique (ideally globally unique). urn:uuid: is always a good option but using URLs under a prefix you control is just an easy way to get a globally unique ID. (In fact one of the problems with live URL IDs is that people often accidentally change the ID if the like URL changes.)
jtvjan 2y ago
Just gotta add a nice XSLT stylesheet to that feed.xml and people with only web browsers can also enjoy the blog. ex1: https://darekkay.com/atom.xml https://darekkay.com/atom.xml ex2: https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwsalgemeen https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwsalgemeen
chrismorgan 2y ago
You can very practically make this viewable in normal web browsers if you give it an XSLT stylesheet, and preferably use <content type="xhtml"> instead of <content type="html"> so that you don’t even need any JavaScript to unescape things (grumble grumble, disable-output-escaping, grumble grumble, messy unmaintained XML pipelines with ancient feature support, grumble grumble). Here’s a sample, having taken this feed.xml, switched it to <content type="xhtml">, and added my own stylesheet: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml There’s all kinds of fun stuff you can then add, such as pagination as you get more entries, rather than just deleting old ones. I’d suggest adding actual links using the fragment and xml:id attribute (mapped to HTML id in the stylesheet), but that wouldn’t play nicely with pagination shifting entries. You can even do things like publish an Atom entry document for each entry, so they have their own paths, but that that URL is still an Atom document. Basically, if you want to, you can completely realistically have a full blog where everything is in Atom containers instead of HTML containers.
- captn3m0 2y ago
  An extension like Feed Preview also works well: https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/feed-preview/ https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee...
  - chrismorgan 2y ago
    That’s user-side. Giving the feed a stylesheet works for everyone, not requiring that they install an extension first.
- internetter 2y ago
  You can even do it without switching the content type: https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml
  - chrismorgan 2y ago
    That applies a CSS stylesheet to the XML tree directly, which has serious limitations: you can’t make links, you don’t get a document title, you don’t get a useful accessibility tree, you can’t change the order of the tree… I would always recommend using an XSL transformation first, in order to avoid these limitations.
rubinlinux 2y ago
How do i know if i want to sub to this if i cant see what type of things they post first?
- crtasm 2y ago
  I can see by clicking the .xml link in my web browser.
doodpants 2y ago
...But I don't want to read blogs in my feed reader. I always click the permalink to read the post at its original source. What's the purpose of forcing me to endure my reader's inferior UX?
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  You could try reading this site in a different feed reader that does polish its UX?
  - doodpants 2y ago
    Well, it's not really about the UX. My purpose for using a feed aggregator is to keep up with blogs that I want to read, not to replace the sites on which I read them.
gradientsrneat 2y ago
Objection! The blog's rss page doesn't block common browser user agents, so it's still technically possible to view in a web browser. ;) More seriously, RSS readers do exist which use the browser's user agent, so I don't recommend blocking those.
sgtnoodle 2y ago
I read the XML directly in my browser out of spite.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  I had hoped it would include a harsh criticism of determinism, as well as of intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man discusses in terms of the simple math problem: two times two makes four, but these XML nodes from the Underground seem to have a different author.
esbranson 2y ago
As mentioned by chrismorgan, internetter, miduil, and others, CSS can be used to style XML without XSL transforms and is much more performant. The first time I saw this in the wild was the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) XML used by the US government, it can style large documents that their previous XML format with XSLT would choke on.[1] It's always interesting when government is more cutting edge than experimental stuff on the Web. It would be nice to get some standardized, basic CSS going for Atom feeds that anyone can link to and just works. [1] https://www.govinfo.gov/features/beta-uslm-xml https://www.govinfo.gov/features/beta-uslm-xml
CalRobert 2y ago
What a coincidence! I just was looking up a comic I used to read - Bizarro - and recalled that years ago I used an RSS reader to keep up with all sorts of comics, etc. and just fell out of the habit. And then I found that Bizarro has no RSS feed. Thanks for doing one small thing to keep a great tool alive.
collsni 2y ago
https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml
Fileformat 2y ago
I made feed.style[1] to help people add a decent XSLT stylesheet to their feed. I'm using it myself[2] and really like the effect. I think it always makes sense to have a stylesheet (and use text/xml content type): otherwise people clicking a rss/atom link are greeted with a wall of xml (or a download prompt). Hard to think of a worse UI for people who aren't familiar with feeds & feed readers. [1] https://www.feed.style/ https://www.feed.style/ [2] https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml
- Fileformat 2y ago
  feed.style also has a 'try it' feature: Here is what the OP's feed looks like with the stylesheet: https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftheunderground.blog%2Ffeed.xml https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthe...

101 points by 8organicbits 2y ago

Great part is you can also style the rss feeds with with `.css` https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://interconnected.org/home/feed https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-feed-v3.xsl https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-...

joneil 2y ago
I never realised this - thanks! It feels like by adding styling I could make those who click on the “feed” link, but don’t yet know what RSS is have a much better experience than seeing unstyled XML and being confused.
genmon 2y ago
thanks for sharing! I also run https://www.aboutfeeds.com https://www.aboutfeeds.com which is a simple "explainer" for those new to RSS the limitation of feed styling is that it requires custom http headers: Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8 # not application/rss+xml x-content-type-options: nosniff and so it doesn't work on GitHub Pages, which is otherwise my go-to for building + hosting static sites. so... if anyone from GitHub is reading this, please make it possible to tweak the page headers! (and if you know anyone there, please pass on this request :)
- arccy 2y ago
  or you can use XSLT, no headers required https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3770-using-xslt-and-xml-transformations-to-style-my-blogs-rss-feed-as-an-html-page.htm https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3770-using-xslt-and-xml-transf...

bayindirh 2y ago

This is the same as tdarb.org's "Shinobi Website" phase[0]. For more information see [1]. Sadly, tdarb.org is dead, but the HN link[1] is not. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220523124655/https://tdarb.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220523124655/https://tdarb.org... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372373

javajosh 2y ago

I guess its time to make a blog that's only available to read through ssh now.

bovermyer 2y ago
Nothing's stopping you. Or you could just run a blog on the Gemini protocol. Either is fine.
hyperorca 2y ago
You can even start selling coffee there, while you're at it.
- sujayk_33 2y ago
  someone's already doing that LoL
  - tentacleuno 2y ago
    https://terminal.shop https://terminal.shop :)
  - pedrogpimenta 2y ago
    that's the joke
wffurr 2y ago
Do you mean a .plan and .project file for finger?
surfingdino 2y ago
Go mTLS, go hardcore.
anthk 2y ago
SDF has blogs over gopher:// gopher://sdf.org/1/phlogs And often, if not usually, or always, the gopher content outmatches the web sites as maintaing a gopher blog it's dead easy compared to the web. No styles, you can post via a script, images would just placed as a link in the end, or under an images/ directory to be read later.

codetiger 2y ago

BYOF - Bring your own frontend

flir 2y ago
That sounds a lot more fun than Gemini, tbh.

Waterluvian 2y ago

It’s basically just an API then?

PurpleRamen 2y ago
It's delivered in HTML embedded in XML, instead of pure HTML or some JavaScript/HTML-shenanigan. Not really an API.
Gormo 2y ago
No, it's just an Atom feed, with no corresponding HTML page. No APIs are really involved.

superkuh 2y ago

There was a military analysis site with free and paid versions. For 7 years running if you subscribed to the RSS feed you received the full paid content in the feeds for free. It was great. Eventually enough people must have been clicking "paid" links to paid resources (pdfs, images, etc) in the feed content that they noticed and stopped providing full post content in RSS (for free and paid).

lasermike026 2y ago

This works.

kwhitefoot 2y ago

Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write. Doesn't this make it worse?

xandrius 2y ago
I guess the situation is so bad that a gimmick like this might actually help.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  I have a lot of feeds in my reader, but I don't add feeds without first seeing the content on the Web. This gimmick is nothing special to me. For someone who doesn't use feeds, I doubt they would start doing so for a mystery meat blog.
  - nazgulsenpai 2y ago
    I imagine the author has baked in that people who don't use feeds won't use a blog that requires it be read as a feed.
Kwpolska 2y ago
It absolutely does. I can't share a link to a post, so spreading the word about the blog's existence is pretty hard.
Retr0id 2y ago
That's only a problem if your goal is to be read by as many people as possible.
- Closi 2y ago
  Or if your goal is that interested parties can find and access it easily. Otherwise why make it a blog and not just a private document?
  - 2y ago

PurpleRamen 2y ago

Curious which impact this will have on the web-crawler. Will they ignore it? Will they push it, as they have subscribed themselves to the feed? Or will they experience a divide by zero-situation and go bonkers?

kevincox 2y ago
Many web crawlers (including Google IIUC) will subscribe to the feeds. But I think they just use it as a way to efficiently discover new pages rather than directly surfacing the results in search. So likely since the posts don't have a web URL they won't appear in search results.

Retr0id 2y ago

> I'm sorry about using a non-spec compliant ID on the entries, but there are no URLs for blog posts to set it to. Assuming they're just arbitrary IDs, using urn:uuid: might be a more compliant version of the same idea https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bis-00.html https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bi...

kevincox 2y ago
The URLs also don't need to exist as an HTML webpage. They just need to be unique (ideally globally unique). urn:uuid: is always a good option but using URLs under a prefix you control is just an easy way to get a globally unique ID. (In fact one of the problems with live URL IDs is that people often accidentally change the ID if the like URL changes.)

jtvjan 2y ago

Just gotta add a nice XSLT stylesheet to that feed.xml and people with only web browsers can also enjoy the blog. ex1: https://darekkay.com/atom.xml https://darekkay.com/atom.xml ex2: https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwsalgemeen https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwsalgemeen

chrismorgan 2y ago

You can very practically make this viewable in normal web browsers if you give it an XSLT stylesheet, and preferably use <content type="xhtml"> instead of <content type="html"> so that you don’t even need any JavaScript to unescape things (grumble grumble, disable-output-escaping, grumble grumble, messy unmaintained XML pipelines with ancient feature support, grumble grumble). Here’s a sample, having taken this feed.xml, switched it to <content type="xhtml">, and added my own stylesheet: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml There’s all kinds of fun stuff you can then add, such as pagination as you get more entries, rather than just deleting old ones. I’d suggest adding actual links using the fragment and xml:id attribute (mapped to HTML id in the stylesheet), but that wouldn’t play nicely with pagination shifting entries. You can even do things like publish an Atom entry document for each entry, so they have their own paths, but that that URL is still an Atom document. Basically, if you want to, you can completely realistically have a full blog where everything is in Atom containers instead of HTML containers.

captn3m0 2y ago
An extension like Feed Preview also works well: https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/feed-preview/ https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee...
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  That’s user-side. Giving the feed a stylesheet works for everyone, not requiring that they install an extension first.
internetter 2y ago
You can even do it without switching the content type: https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  That applies a CSS stylesheet to the XML tree directly, which has serious limitations: you can’t make links, you don’t get a document title, you don’t get a useful accessibility tree, you can’t change the order of the tree… I would always recommend using an XSL transformation first, in order to avoid these limitations.

rubinlinux 2y ago

How do i know if i want to sub to this if i cant see what type of things they post first?

crtasm 2y ago
I can see by clicking the .xml link in my web browser.

doodpants 2y ago

...But I don't want to read blogs in my feed reader. I always click the permalink to read the post at its original source. What's the purpose of forcing me to endure my reader's inferior UX?

WorldMaker 2y ago
You could try reading this site in a different feed reader that does polish its UX?
- doodpants 2y ago
  Well, it's not really about the UX. My purpose for using a feed aggregator is to keep up with blogs that I want to read, not to replace the sites on which I read them.

gradientsrneat 2y ago

Objection! The blog's rss page doesn't block common browser user agents, so it's still technically possible to view in a web browser. ;) More seriously, RSS readers do exist which use the browser's user agent, so I don't recommend blocking those.

sgtnoodle 2y ago

I read the XML directly in my browser out of spite.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
082349872349872 2y ago
I had hoped it would include a harsh criticism of determinism, as well as of intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man discusses in terms of the simple math problem: two times two makes four, but these XML nodes from the Underground seem to have a different author.

esbranson 2y ago

As mentioned by chrismorgan, internetter, miduil, and others, CSS can be used to style XML without XSL transforms and is much more performant. The first time I saw this in the wild was the United States Legislative Markup (USLM) XML used by the US government, it can style large documents that their previous XML format with XSLT would choke on.[1] It's always interesting when government is more cutting edge than experimental stuff on the Web. It would be nice to get some standardized, basic CSS going for Atom feeds that anyone can link to and just works. [1] https://www.govinfo.gov/features/beta-uslm-xml https://www.govinfo.gov/features/beta-uslm-xml

CalRobert 2y ago

What a coincidence! I just was looking up a comic I used to read - Bizarro - and recalled that years ago I used an RSS reader to keep up with all sorts of comics, etc. and just fell out of the habit. And then I found that Bizarro has no RSS feed. Thanks for doing one small thing to keep a great tool alive.

collsni 2y ago

https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml

Fileformat 2y ago

I made feed.style[1] to help people add a decent XSLT stylesheet to their feed. I'm using it myself[2] and really like the effect. I think it always makes sense to have a stylesheet (and use text/xml content type): otherwise people clicking a rss/atom link are greeted with a wall of xml (or a download prompt). Hard to think of a worse UI for people who aren't familiar with feeds & feed readers. [1] https://www.feed.style/ https://www.feed.style/ [2] https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml

Fileformat 2y ago
feed.style also has a 'try it' feature: Here is what the OP's feed looks like with the stylesheet: https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftheunderground.blog%2Ffeed.xml https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthe...