Tag: aggregator

Surfing the beta wave

     

I have been testing Flipboard’s Surf beta for a while. I have been meaning to write about it for a long while but have been busy due to redundancy.

What is Surf? I could go into detail but I would say it’s a way to aggregate a number of sources and share them in a form which others can follow or flip through. It’s all using the fediverse and acts like a first class citizen of it. I gather Bluesky has a similar type thing where you can design and share algorithms to others. I guess it’s like that but so much more.

So I have setup a couple of channels one for digital legacy and dating troubles. For the dating one I have connected up a few dating YouTubers and my own raindrop.io bookmarks using the same scope (dating troubles).

This means not only can I have add things to followers by manually adding posts, media, etc but every time my bookmarks are updated it’s reflected across the fediverse too? Pretty sure this is kind of true but I guess what makes surf more compelling compared to a RSS reader is the client reader. What else do you expect from the team behind Flipboard? Although it’s beta, it’s smooth and well thought out, not just for reading but for creating too.

I wasn’t surprised it supported activitypub, meaning you can aggregate or group from across the fediverse (oh yes and bluesky) but RSS really opens things up a lot more. I can see this being super useful for businesses, community leaders and those into super niche topics. I choose the things which I have been tracking anyway, but been thinking about one for the #pacemkaerdevice #pebblewatch #diabolotricks #eatingoutallergies, etc etc.

I also gather as Surf creates a activitypub feed you could aggregate those back into another surf account created levels piping (something I talked about about 20 years ago)

Generally I like it and look forward to the next update…

By the way if you are interested use the referral code CUBICGARDEN when signing up for the waitlist. Mastodon sign up are the priority right now but Bluesky is still in progress.

Tiny tiny RSS experience a week later?

I have had quite a bit of feedback from my post about moving away from Feedly to a self hosted solution called Tiny Tiny RSS.

Some interesting questions have emerged from people and to be fair it certainly deserves a follow up.

I made my instance of TT-RSS available on the public netw, because I didn’t see the point of installing my VPN software on my eink reader. I also installed the official TT-RSS app which is a 7 day trail before you buy the full version for 4 pounds. I haven’t bought the full version yet because the app doesn’t seem to work well when offline? It would be great if the app understood if the device was offline and automaticilly disabled the update feeds option. It currently doesn’t seem to do this well… I much prefer Greader for this, but ttrss app isn’t far behind.

Simon commented he paid for Feedly because of the IFTTT options, but it seems weird to pay for this  because you can easily turn most of TT-RSS into a another feed and IFTTT has a RSS option which you can use to trigger most things. This reminds me of my work along while back about pipelines.

Because of this, I have been thinking about feeding Greader with the RSS from my TTRSS install. The only real disadvantage is nothing would be synced to the server? This is also something I’ve been thinking about with a linux desktop reader like thunderbird because I can’t seem to install a TTRSS reader which works.

I tried a few but each has had problems.

Feed the Moneky looked very promising but when I finally get the appimage loaded, it shows nothing? Feedreader looked great and after finally getting flatpak working, I’m faced with the error that I need to install the api-feedreader plugin in my TTRSS server. How I do this when I’m using docker is a question I have no answer for, except it seems I need to use another docker container?

So generally its going well but hitting a few points which need straighing out. It would be so useful to compile supported applications into a wiki page.

Oh I found this useful when understanding about appimages, snap, flatpak, etc.