💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 002621.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:04:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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easeout at tilde.team easeout at tilde.team
Thu Sep 10 00:54:12 BST 2020
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On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 04:17:43PM -0400, Paper wrote:
I am an author of a feed reader and I thought about implementing this
after I read this, but there are some problems:
How should my feed reader behave if there are links to different paths
on the page? I think I should reject all links from a different domain
and from a different protocol, but there could be a link to the same
domain, but to a different path.
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/ back
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/gemlog/1/ post 1
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/gemlog/2/ post 2
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/contact/ contact to me
Here, it is visible which ones are the blog entries and which ones are
something else, but a program would have to guess. I don't think it
would be a good idea to hardcode that everything with gemlog in the path
is a feed item, that would cause too much confusion. Also, different
clients would behave differently adding to the confusion.
I'm suggesting only a bare bones, dead simple, worse-is-better,get-what-you-can-with-what's-on-hand version of syndication. I wouldjust collect all links on the page and not devise an intelligent way tofilter them, as if we were scraping web pages for only the good stuff. Iagree that would lead to divergent behavior among clients.
So let it be just the simplest possible implementation. The upgrade pathto a nicer experience would be for the author to publish RSS or Atom inorder to select just the right links for readers.
It is a great idea, but I think we could instead write a script or a
cli-program which would output Atom/RSS/Json feed for a gemini URL
given. This program would do the neccessary guessing and parsing and
output something that can be understood by all RSS libraries and
clients. Some clients I know support running a command to get a feed.
Or we could just use gemfeed to generate Atom for us.
Generating Atom et al is the kind of thing many Gemini authors arealready doing (like me!), and those folks certainly don't need to worryabout this idea. When a feed is offered, I think users will prefer touse it.
But if this takes off, new authors who haven't taken the step ofgenerating a feed will be more tied into the conversation already. Forinstance, I was not going to get any blog replies or readership until Idid the work to publish Atom so I could then submit to CAPCOM. An 80%solution would have helped me get engaged as a newcomer. It would alsohelp future users as Gemini's audience slowly broadens to include a lesstechnical crowd.
One more benefit for us early adopters: If we lower the barrier to entryfor others, it will mean more content for us to read and engage with.