[users] Announcing Antenna!

1. Björn Wärmedal (bjorn.warmedal (a) gmail.com)

gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

Antenna is a feed aggregator that stays fresh, as long as we as a
community 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 even
daily and many feeds become stale or disappear. You could improve this
by some exponential back-off strategy and maybe dropping feeds that
have been repeatedly unreachable. But what if a gemlog that hasn't
posted in months publishes a new post? Your back-off strategy could
cause the feed to lag a long time behind before seeing this post.

Antenna works differently. It doesn't remember feed URLs. It doesn't
intermittently poll feeds. Instead it relies on publishers willingness
to add an extra step to their publishing process: when your
Atom/RSS/gemsub feed has been updated, make a gemini call to
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/submit with the URL to your feed as the
query 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 this
queue is read, the feeds in it fetched, parsed, and added to the
Antenna 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 223
even still exist), but if we want to keep it fresh henceforth we'll
have to keep sending it new content!

As you may have noticed the page is formatted as a gemsub feed, so
that your gemini browser can subscribe to it and thereby get all the
news from geminispace in a timely fashion.

Did you submit a feed but nothing happened? You can actually check the
log, 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 :)

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2. ew.gemini (ew.gemini (a) nassur.net)

Hej hej,

Björn Wärmedal <bjorn.warmedal@gmail.com> writes:

> gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

>snip<

>
> Antenna works differently. It doesn't remember feed URLs. It doesn't
> intermittently poll feeds. Instead it relies on publishers willingness
> to add an extra step to their publishing process: when your
> Atom/RSS/gemsub feed has been updated, make a gemini call to
> gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/submit with the URL to your feed as the
> query string. I do it by using my gemcall:
>
> gemcall -u gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/submit?warmedal.se/~bjorn/atom.xml
>

"It turns the problem around". Impressive.

I probably should train the habit of this turning around even
more.

Sometimes, when we ($dayjob) are on a bug hunt, I say "But what
if this phenomenon should be a feature? What if I wanted to have
it like that? Where in the code would you implement it?" Often
this leads us closer to the source of the problem.

It's probably just a psycological trick, but as long as it helps ...

>snip<

Cheers,
~ew

-- 
Keep it simple!

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3. panda-roux (contact (a) panda-roux.dev)

Hi ew0k,

It's exciting to see folks trying new approaches to traditional tasks!

I have a question (actually two):

If I remove an item from my personal feed and re-submit, will that item
be removed from your database as well?

In other words, does your service purge everything from a given domain
before re-digesting a given feed URL?

Thanks,

panda-roux

On Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 11:31:12AM +0200, Björn Wärmedal wrote:
> gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
> 
> Antenna is a feed aggregator that stays fresh, as long as we as a
> community 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 even
> daily and many feeds become stale or disappear. You could improve this
> ...

Link to individual message.

4. Björn Wärmedal (bjorn.warmedal (a) gmail.com)

> If I remove an item from my personal feed and re-submit, will that item
> be removed from your database as well?
>
> In other words, does your service purge everything from a given domain
> before re-digesting a given feed URL?

It doesn't currently. The ENTRIES table in the database looks like this:
entries (author text, updated datetime, title text, link text primary key)

I could add a column for "feedurl" and purge that before re-adding it,
but I'm not sure it's worth the extra complexity. Entries disappear
after only a week anyway.

Hmm. I'm gonna have a look at this in the next couple of days.

Cheers,
ew0k

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