4 ms·

CLI RSS/Atom feed reader inspired by Taskwarrior, synced using Git

76 points by todsacerdoti 7mo ago

susam 7mo ago
Glad to see an RSS/Atom feed reader project on HN. The demo looks nice. The 'Design Philosophy' section [1] is rather nice too. The more such projects we have, the merrier. In my view, adding an RSS/Atom feed is one of the best things one can do for a personal website, provided one wants to be part of the loose social network and ecosystem that exists around RSS/Atom feeds. Some detractors might say that RSS is dead today, but the reality is far from it. In fact, most of the traffic to my personal website comes from RSS feeds. A little game on my website even became moderately popular after someone discovered it via my RSS feed and shared it here on HN [2]. In fact the three largest sources of traffic to my website are, in decreasing order, RSS feeds, newsletters and search engines. Reviewing the referer (sic) data in my web server logs from time to time, I was surprised to discover just how many community maintained tech newsletters exist on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers. But I digress. Back to RSS/Atom feeds now. So I was saying that there is indeed a decent user base around RSS feeds. I can see from the 'referer' logs that every time I publish a new note or article on my website, a good number of visitors arrive by clicking a feed entry that shows up in their feed reader. I know this with some confidence by looking at the 'referer' headers of visits to my HTML pages and the subsequent browsing of the website, as opposed to the isolated and automated fetches of the XML feeds. So there must be a reasonably active base of users around RSS feeds. It is a bit like being part of an invisible social network that we know exists and that we can measure through indirect evidence. Many personal websites publish a blogroll with a list of their favourite bloggers. One thing I wish more blogrolls had is links to the bloggers' feeds or, even better, an OPML file that I could import into my feed reader. Then I could keep multiple collections of blogs in my feed reader, for example Alice's Blogroll, Bob's Blogroll and so on. I do publish an OPML file for my blogroll [3], and I urge other personal websites with blogrolls to do the same. [1] https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy [2] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html [3] https://susam.net/roll.html https://susam.net/roll.html
treetalker 7mo ago
This would really hit the spot with saved (and ad hoc) content searches! Any plans to add that?
- kantord 7mo ago
  I was considering adding a full offline mode but here is my thinking: that is actually a feature/concern that would be separately useful, so it should not be baked into blogtato. And there might be already some pretty good options out there. For instance, `wget` is a pretty widely used HTTP client that is able to mirror links for offline access. Then you can use standard tools such as `grep` to search in all the offline content. And `blogtato` does already have an export feature, so it is almost trivial to write a script that saves all posts for online content. So perhaps what should be done here is find a user friendly tool for offline access/search for web content and just add some convenience features to `blogtato` so that they integrate very easily.
kantord 7mo ago
Hi todsacerdoti thanks for posting my project! I am the author if blogtato. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them
- matthews3 7mo ago
  It's a bot that reposts popular links from Lobste.rs.
  - kantord 7mo ago
    oh no! but that makes sense. I did post it on Lobste.rs myself
throwaway27448 7mo ago
How did "taskwarrior" become so influential? It doesn't seem to provide anything other GTD code doesn't provide, but it only offers an inaccessible interface. What's the draw here?
- kantord 7mo ago
  i do not find the interface of taskwarrior inaccessible at all, i actually really love using it and find it largely intuitive. Not necessarily for doing super complex stuff, but that is not something I ever wanted anyways
  - throwaway27448 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kantord 7mo ago
      nope! why?
      - throwaway27448 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        kantord 7mo ago
        honestly, I interpreted your comment as "Taskwarrior is unusable shit" since it had a pretty negative tone and came from a user named throwaway27448. Actual accessibility is a different topic. Honestly I don't know much about the a11y of CLI apps in general. Is there something that makes Taskwarrior bad in that regard? Is it about the way it forms things like list outputs or tables?
- senkora 7mo ago
IgorPartola 7mo ago
Minor nitpick but this is TUI and not CLI. CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any other program.
- petcat 7mo ago
  It looks like it's both
- kantord 7mo ago
  there might be some gaps (let me know) but you can actually pipe the output to another program. for instance here's how you'd download all the unread blog posts by combining blogtato and wget: blog .unread read | wget \ --recursive --level=1 \ --page-requisites \ --convert-links \ --adjust-extension \ --no-parent \ --directory-prefix="$HOME/offline-posts" \ --input-file=-
  - IgorPartola 7mo ago
    Oh sweet. I always appreciate having the ability to script this kind of thing.
- pwdisswordfishy 7mo ago
  You started out strong but fumbled in your second sentence. > CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any other program. No, that's not a prereq for a CLI. "CLI" means "command-line interface", that's it. Vim's command line is still a command line even though it's totally disjoint from the UNIX shell and the entire process model. Even primarily graphical apps can expose a command line in the UI. Think of the VSCode command palette, for example, copied from SublimeText. (Though all the examples cited here are editors, there's no reason for it to be restricted to that. Indeed, even more graphical apps should sport command lines inside them.)
  - IgorPartola 7mo ago
    Heh fair enough. I conflated the UNIX shell and command line as a general concept.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
renegat0x0 7mo ago
I maintain list of feeds, if anyone is interested https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
aitchnyu 7mo ago
Git/SSH could be a great interface for more tools. Copy a binary to a server, chmod a few files and you have sync for password manager, RSS reader, notes app etc. 8$ VPS for a year (Racknerd) without Nginx or LetsEncrypt. OpenClaw is one.

76 points by todsacerdoti 7mo ago

susam 7mo ago

Glad to see an RSS/Atom feed reader project on HN. The demo looks nice. The 'Design Philosophy' section [1] is rather nice too. The more such projects we have, the merrier. In my view, adding an RSS/Atom feed is one of the best things one can do for a personal website, provided one wants to be part of the loose social network and ecosystem that exists around RSS/Atom feeds. Some detractors might say that RSS is dead today, but the reality is far from it. In fact, most of the traffic to my personal website comes from RSS feeds. A little game on my website even became moderately popular after someone discovered it via my RSS feed and shared it here on HN [2]. In fact the three largest sources of traffic to my website are, in decreasing order, RSS feeds, newsletters and search engines. Reviewing the referer (sic) data in my web server logs from time to time, I was surprised to discover just how many community maintained tech newsletters exist on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers. But I digress. Back to RSS/Atom feeds now. So I was saying that there is indeed a decent user base around RSS feeds. I can see from the 'referer' logs that every time I publish a new note or article on my website, a good number of visitors arrive by clicking a feed entry that shows up in their feed reader. I know this with some confidence by looking at the 'referer' headers of visits to my HTML pages and the subsequent browsing of the website, as opposed to the isolated and automated fetches of the XML feeds. So there must be a reasonably active base of users around RSS feeds. It is a bit like being part of an invisible social network that we know exists and that we can measure through indirect evidence. Many personal websites publish a blogroll with a list of their favourite bloggers. One thing I wish more blogrolls had is links to the bloggers' feeds or, even better, an OPML file that I could import into my feed reader. Then I could keep multiple collections of blogs in my feed reader, for example Alice's Blogroll, Bob's Blogroll and so on. I do publish an OPML file for my blogroll [3], and I urge other personal websites with blogrolls to do the same. [1] https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy [2] https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html https://susam.net/from-web-feed-to-186850-hits.html [3] https://susam.net/roll.html https://susam.net/roll.html

treetalker 7mo ago

This would really hit the spot with saved (and ad hoc) content searches! Any plans to add that?

kantord 7mo ago
I was considering adding a full offline mode but here is my thinking: that is actually a feature/concern that would be separately useful, so it should not be baked into blogtato. And there might be already some pretty good options out there. For instance, `wget` is a pretty widely used HTTP client that is able to mirror links for offline access. Then you can use standard tools such as `grep` to search in all the offline content. And `blogtato` does already have an export feature, so it is almost trivial to write a script that saves all posts for online content. So perhaps what should be done here is find a user friendly tool for offline access/search for web content and just add some convenience features to `blogtato` so that they integrate very easily.

kantord 7mo ago

Hi todsacerdoti thanks for posting my project! I am the author if blogtato. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them

matthews3 7mo ago
It's a bot that reposts popular links from Lobste.rs.
- kantord 7mo ago
  oh no! but that makes sense. I did post it on Lobste.rs myself

throwaway27448 7mo ago

How did "taskwarrior" become so influential? It doesn't seem to provide anything other GTD code doesn't provide, but it only offers an inaccessible interface. What's the draw here?

kantord 7mo ago
i do not find the interface of taskwarrior inaccessible at all, i actually really love using it and find it largely intuitive. Not necessarily for doing super complex stuff, but that is not something I ever wanted anyways
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kantord 7mo ago
    nope! why?
    - throwaway27448 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - kantord 7mo ago
        honestly, I interpreted your comment as "Taskwarrior is unusable shit" since it had a pretty negative tone and came from a user named throwaway27448. Actual accessibility is a different topic. Honestly I don't know much about the a11y of CLI apps in general. Is there something that makes Taskwarrior bad in that regard? Is it about the way it forms things like list outputs or tables?
senkora 7mo ago

IgorPartola 7mo ago

Minor nitpick but this is TUI and not CLI. CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any other program.

petcat 7mo ago
It looks like it's both
kantord 7mo ago
there might be some gaps (let me know) but you can actually pipe the output to another program. for instance here's how you'd download all the unread blog posts by combining blogtato and wget: blog .unread read | wget \ --recursive --level=1 \ --page-requisites \ --convert-links \ --adjust-extension \ --no-parent \ --directory-prefix="$HOME/offline-posts" \ --input-file=-
- IgorPartola 7mo ago
  Oh sweet. I always appreciate having the ability to script this kind of thing.
pwdisswordfishy 7mo ago
You started out strong but fumbled in your second sentence. > CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any other program. No, that's not a prereq for a CLI. "CLI" means "command-line interface", that's it. Vim's command line is still a command line even though it's totally disjoint from the UNIX shell and the entire process model. Even primarily graphical apps can expose a command line in the UI. Think of the VSCode command palette, for example, copied from SublimeText. (Though all the examples cited here are editors, there's no reason for it to be restricted to that. Indeed, even more graphical apps should sport command lines inside them.)
- IgorPartola 7mo ago
  Heh fair enough. I conflated the UNIX shell and command line as a general concept.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

renegat0x0 7mo ago

I maintain list of feeds, if anyone is interested https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds

aitchnyu 7mo ago

Git/SSH could be a great interface for more tools. Copy a binary to a server, chmod a few files and you have sync for password manager, RSS reader, notes app etc. 8$ VPS for a year (Racknerd) without Nginx or LetsEncrypt. OpenClaw is one.