@dave BTW it took me a while to get the websocket client I have been using (Mint.WebSocket, Elixir) connected to the firehose. Couldn’t find the source code, but your server only accepts a “Connection: Upgrade” header and replies with a 400 error when Mint sends “Connection: upgrade” (lowercase). I filed an issue in the Mint repository about it.
Testing my firehose reader (update). Testing. Turns out it wasn't the socket client that was the problem, but the fact that often the updates don't have titles and I was expecting them to. D'oh.
That’s possible on the little Elixir clone server I’m working on. And if a user changes her screen name, her feed’s exposed URL also changes, although the feed’s item links stay the same.
I have an rss.chat UI added to my naive Elixir/Phoenix-built news reader (which started out with the API from feedbin). I only have a couple of unanswered questions:
1. rss.chat feed permalinks are based on the screenname. What happens if a user wants to change her handle?
2. the API indicates that an item can have an enclosure, but I don’t see how to post an item with an enclosure either vis the frontend or via the API.
3. Are there any ideas about how to grow a federation of rss.chat servers? (This question may expose my naivite concerning RSS’s inbound and outbound possibilities.)
I'm also exploring Buttondown, a newsletter mailing list software, which uses Markdown as its native format for composing emails, as part of my job managing a WordPress site for a non-profit. Buttondown can subscribe to any RSS feed and turn the items into a draft email (with the items' content converted from HTML to Markdown) that you can then tweak before sending it out to subscribers. I was able to create a custom RSS feed out of WordPress that has source:markdown content for its items, and now I'm trying to convince the Buttondown people to parse that out and have it appear in the draft without modification.
It's in a private repo. It's just a hobby project, to learn more about all the various RSS feeds out there in the wild. I was able to add some of the demo.rss.chat functionality in it in a short period of time--creating and editing posts, creating a websocket firehose. Next up is adding and showing replies.
I had already started building a feed reader in Elixir in the past month or so. Now I'm adding RSS chat features. Very nice work, Dave. Long live RSS! Long live Markdown!
I love the idea of RSS.chat