Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator

https://routley.io/posts/bespoke-software-rss-aggregator/

by jmlr • 6 years ago

54 10 6 years ago

rhacker• 6 years ago

Nice domain name, it's your last name, but I had assumed it was a company that did some kind of routing :)

Oh neat! Coincidental timing for me too seeing this as I'm procrastinating finishing up my own similar thing but built on totally different infrastructure (Ruby, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, so far..) and for a different set of feeds (several hundred tech engineering blogs). GitHub Actions is something I did consider, but I'm trying to go AWS for everything recently to learn the ecosystem more. (The initial results of my own experiment are at http://engblogs.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html but it's going to become a 'proper' site as part of the next step.)

bArray• 6 years ago

Nice idea, but it feels like this itself should produce an RSS feed so that others can benefit from your collection - for the same reason you yourself use RSS.

flobosg• 6 years ago

Here's another barebones reader from 2018: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2018/02/my-feed-reading-system...

icebraining2• 6 years ago

I have to admit (with a bit of shame, as a Free Software fan) that most of the software I write on a personal basis is like this: bespoke & unpublished. It's just too damn work for what I expect to be a pretty small audience.

For example, I have a small cron script that emails me today's showtimes for my local film museum (which shows old films on a large screen) along with the predicted score from Criticker.

It would be cool if there was some very easy way (I'm lazy!) of letting a non-techie benefit from this, without me having to deal with a publicly available server, storing their Criticker credentials, etc.

I guess the easiest way would be a Chrome extension, but I'm not a fan of the whole app store part, plus I don't want to have to rewrite in JS. And that still leaves mobile users in the cold, which is dumb.

ssivark• 6 years ago

Basically, we’d like everyone to run their own server where they could add your process as a unit, rather than you running a server for everyone.

I guess this might have been very useful as a Huginn module. Maybe Urbit matures to be a functional version of this. The problem is that today’s computing culture grooms people to be dependent on others’ servers/services, rather than being in control of one machine of theirs.

icebraining2• 6 years ago

I mean, sure, I'd like everyone to run their own server. But in this case I don't think you'd even need it, a scheduled task in a regular client machine (smartphone/laptop/etc) would be enough. There just isn't an easy way for me to turn my script into something that a smartphone can use, without building a full-fledged app.

nighthawk454• 6 years ago

I often have a similar problem. It's hard to get around server requirements in a simple and cheap way. And very hard to do simple cross-platform without JS.

Barring that, Github Pages is pretty good. You can get pretty far with a webapp that has some degree of caching/cookie/offline storage. Probably enough to display your local showtimes and maybe even interface with the user's Criticker – presuming Criticker has a CORS-enabled API. Automatic cross-platform UI and mobile support, no app stores or extensions. With Github Actions, I think you could even webpack a React app if you wanted.

But running it on a schedule and sending an email.... suddenly much more work.

mattalbie• 6 years ago

Thrilled to see this, and I already forked and am using it. This is exactly what I've been looking for.

Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator

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