Björn Wärmedal bjorn.warmedal at gmail.com
Wed Jun 30 10:31:12 BST 2021
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gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
Antenna is a feed aggregator that stays fresh, as long as we as acommunity want it to!
A common feed aggregator polls all its known feeds at least once a day(often four to five times a day), but most feeds rarely update evendaily and many feeds become stale or disappear. You could improve thisby some exponential back-off strategy and maybe dropping feeds thathave been repeatedly unreachable. But what if a gemlog that hasn'tposted in months publishes a new post? Your back-off strategy couldcause the feed to lag a long time behind before seeing this post.
Antenna works differently. It doesn't remember feed URLs. It doesn'tintermittently poll feeds. Instead it relies on publishers willingnessto add an extra step to their publishing process: when yourAtom/RSS/gemsub feed has been updated, make a gemini call togemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/submit with the URL to your feed as thequery string. I do it by using my gemcall:
gemcall -u gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/submit?warmedal.se/~bjorn/atom.xml
When you do, the URL will be added to a queue. Every ten minutes thisqueue is read, the feeds in it fetched, parsed, and added to theAntenna database. Then the queue is emptied and the page regenerated,showing all found entries from the past week.
I've seeded it with all 311 feeds known to CAPCOM (of which only 223even still exist), but if we want to keep it fresh henceforth we'llhave to keep sending it new content!
As you may have noticed the page is formatted as a gemsub feed, sothat your gemini browser can subscribe to it and thereby get all thenews from geminispace in a timely fashion.
Did you submit a feed but nothing happened? You can actually check thelog, and maybe figure out what went wrong from that:
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/~antenna/log
The about page lists the most common errors I've found so far:
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/~antenna/about.gmi
I hope you're as excited about this as I am. See you on Antenna!
Cheers,ew0k
PS: I'm not subscribed to the mailing list anymore. Please "Reply All"if you want me to receive your response :)