├── README.md └── docs ├── categories.md ├── extras.md ├── feedinfopage.md ├── gettingstarted.md ├── goingdeeper.md ├── newsproducts.md ├── readingnews.md ├── readme.md ├── settings.md ├── yourfeed.md └── yourfeedlist.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # FeedLand Support 2 | 3 | FeedLand an application that runs in your web browser for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with others, and reading and sharing news. 4 | 5 | If you have a support issue, something that isn't working properly, or you have a question about how the product works, post an issue here. You can also use the Slack group for the same purpose. 6 | 7 | If you're using FeedLand seriously, you might want to Watch this repo, to be in the flow of support questions and product updates. 8 | 9 | When reporting a problem, be sure it is reproducible, say what you did, expected to happen and what actually happened. Screen shots can be helpful. Please look in the JavaScript console in the browser to see if there are any error messages. That's how the software helps us find what went wrong. Remember also that all the the people helping you are volunteers. Everyone gets respect here, and if someone helps you, be sure to thank them. :smile: 10 | 11 | ### Docs 12 | 13 | Here's a list of the docs we have for FeedLand. 14 | 15 | * Starting up -- how to find feeds to subscribe to, how to read the news, finding other users. 16 | 17 | * Going Deeper -- the Feed List and Feed Info pages. Reading feeds. Settings. 18 | 19 | * Categories -- the key to customization of news and presenting news to non-FeedLand users. 20 | 21 | * News products -- how to make single-page public websites with news generated by FeedLand. 22 | 23 | ### Related projects 24 | 25 | FeedLand is written in Node.js JavaScript on the server, and as an app running in the browser, also in JavaScript. 26 | 27 | A list of open source projects that FeedLand builds on. 28 | 29 | * appserver -- the server framework we use. 30 | 31 | * reallySimple -- parses RSS, Atom and RDF feeds into a standard struction, in JSON. 32 | 33 | * OPML -- read and write OPML files. 34 | 35 | * rssCloud -- feed update notification, part of RSS 2.0. 36 | 37 | FeedLand itself is not at this time open source. 38 | 39 | ### Utilities 40 | 41 | Utilities for people who work with feeds. 42 | 43 | * subscriptionListCleanup-- a Node app that reads an OPML subscription list, and loops over the feeds and only passes on the ones that are reachable and parseable. 44 | 45 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/categories.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Categories in FeedLand 2 | 3 | Categories allow you to customize the news in FeedLand. 4 | 5 | ### How it works 6 | 7 | You can assign each feed you're subscribed to to one or more categories. You decide on the categories, and whether or not to display them as tabs on your main news page in FeedLand. 8 | 9 | ### Deciding on your categories 10 | 11 | First think about what categories you want to use initially. I recommend just using two or three, to get used to the concepts. You can change your mind later. Here's a suggestion of a list of categories to start with. 12 | 13 | ``All, Tech, Politics, NYT, Bloggers`` 14 | 15 | You would then assign feeds that are largely about tech to the Tech category. 16 | 17 | If you were following a tech blogger, you would assign them to both Tech and Bloggers. 18 | 19 | I recommend having an All category, and unless you feel strongly that a feed should not be in it, that all feeds are. 20 | 21 | ### Setting the categories 22 | 23 | When you've decided on a list of categories, open the Settings dialog. Click on the Categories tab. Enter the category names, separated by commas, in the first box. Leave the other boxes empty for now. When you're done click the OK button to save the categories. 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | ### Assigning feeds to categories 28 | 29 | Choose My feed list in the first menu. These are all the feeds you're subscribed to. 30 | 31 | To the right of each name you'll see an icon that looks like a tag. If the tag is dark that means the feed has categories already set, if it's light, only All is checked. Here's what that looks like: 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | When you click it a list of checkboxes for each of your categories appears. Only the All checkbox is checked. 36 | 37 | Click the categories that apply to this feed. The checkboxes are hot, they change in the database immediately when you click on them. 38 | 39 | The title of the feed appears at the top of the dialog. If you hover the mouse over the title you'll see a tooltip with the description of the feed, as provided in the feed itself. Not all feeds have descriptions, and some of them aren't informative. 40 | 41 | The arrows at the bottom of the dialog allow you to move between feeds in the Feed List without having to close and re-open the dialog. 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | ### Adding tabs to your news page 46 | 47 | After assigning categories to some of your feeds, go back to the Settings dialog, and fill in the second box with a few categories: 48 | 49 | ``All, Tech, Politics`` 50 | 51 | Click the OK button to save the new settings, then choose My news from the first menu. You should now see your news organized into three tabs. 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | ### Getting an OPML subscription list for a category 56 | 57 | Suppose you want an OPML subscription list for my politics category. 58 | 59 | http://feedland.org/opml?screenname=davewiner&catname=politics 60 | 61 | You can create a link like that for any user's category. 62 | 63 | Or you can click the orange XML icon in the upper right corner of any page, where you see it. 64 | 65 | ### Facts about categories 66 | 67 | The names of categories are not case-sensitive. 68 | 69 | You can specify the categories for your news page in any order, they don't have to be in the same order as they appear in the main category list. 70 | 71 | ### What does "All" mean? 72 | 73 | When you create a new subscription, it is in no categories. 74 | 75 | If you have no categories defined, ie you're a new user, if you open the Categories dialog for any feed you will have one choice, All. It will not be checked. It's just a suggestion. 76 | 77 | Basically All is a default category for every user. If you don't include it in your list, however, it will not be one of the checkboxes. 78 | 79 | Categories are low-tech, if you delete a category from your list, all subscriptions that you've categorized with that label will remain labeled. The values you put in that dialog control what's in the checkboxes and what's in the tabs on your News page. 80 | 81 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/extras.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Extras 2 | 3 | Features that don't yet deserve their own pages. 4 | 5 | ### Bookmarks in FeedLand 6 | 7 | This feature goes back a long way, to the beginnings of Frontier and Menu Sharing and through Drummer, whose Bookmarks menu is imho a truly revolutionary thing. Here's a screen shot of my current Bookmarks menu in Drummer. You can see I use it a lot. I expect your bookmarks menu will look something like that before too long. 8 | 9 | There are two ways to create a bookmark. 10 | 11 | When you're looking at a news item in a _river_ timeline, there's a new icon at the bottom, that looks like a bookmark. Click it. A dialog confirms that you want to add the bookmark. Then the Bookmarks editor window opens with the new bookmark added at the top. You can edit the text, and use the outliner reorganizing commands to move it where you want. When you're finished, click OK and the menu outline is saved on the server, and the menu is automatically rebuilt with the new bookmark where you put it. 12 | 13 | If you're at a page in FeedLand that you want to get back to easily, say an interesting person's feed list, choose Add Bookmark at the top of the Bookmarks menu. A dialog confirms you want to add this page to the menu. And the process of editing and placing the bookmark works exactly as it does for when creating a bookmark from a timeline. 14 | 15 | The outliner is the same one as in Drummer. For an idea of how to use it see the Outliner howto document. 16 | 17 | ### Feeds of Likes 18 | 19 | Each user can have a feed of all the items they liked in FeedLand. 20 | 21 | You must be logged in to be able to Like something. 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | Click the thumb icon to like an item. 26 | 27 | When you like something it is added to your feed of likes, which you can then subscribe to in FeedLand or any other app that can read an RSS 2.0 feed. 28 | 29 | You have to like something before you actually have the feed. FeedLand won't create it until you like something. 30 | 31 | Here's the address for my feed of likes: http://data.feedland.org/likes/davewiner.xml. 32 | 33 | And here's the Feed Info page for that feed. 34 | 35 | Like icons appear in news pages. To see one of these pages, choose My news from the first menu. 36 | 37 | Here's my news page. If you're logged in you can like items on that page. 38 | 39 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/feedinfopage.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Feed Info page 2 | 3 | Each feed that FeedLand follows has a Feed Info page. 4 | 5 | It's linked to from the Feed List, and from the (feed) link in a River timeline. 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | ### The title links to the feed home page 10 | 11 | When you click on the Title, you're taken to the home page of the site the feed is associated with, via the top-level <link> element in the feed. 12 | 13 | ### The description comes from the feed 14 | 15 | Description comes from the top-level <description> element in the feed. 16 | 17 | ### Viewing the actual feed 18 | 19 | Sometimes when troubleshooting a feed, you need to actually see the source of the feed itself, not a friendly rendering of the feed, as many browsers try to provide. 20 | 21 | The link to the Feed displays the contents of the feed on xmlviewer.scripting.com. If you need the actual URL of the feed, you can copy it from the text at the top of the xmlviewer page. 22 | 23 | ### View and edit categories 24 | 25 | The Categories row lists the categories you have assigned to the feed. If you click the (Edit) button you can change the category assignments in the dialog. 26 | 27 | ### View as 28 | 29 | You can view the contents of a feed either as a timeline (or river) or using a traditional mailbox view. 30 | 31 | These links are also available in the Views menu at the top of each page. 32 | 33 | ### When added 34 | 35 | When added says when the feed was first added to the FeedLand database, and by whom. 36 | 37 | ### When updated 38 | 39 | When updated says the last time we found a new item in the feed. We do recognize other changes in the feed, for example if the text of an item changes, but for us to flag a feed as updated there has to be a wholly new item. 40 | 41 | ### Number of items and checks 42 | 43 | Items / Checks says how many items we have from this feed in the database, and how many times it has been checked for new stuff. There's a button next to this item that tells the server to check the feed right now. 44 | 45 | ### Is it a fast-updating feed? 46 | 47 | Last renew says when the feed's associated rssCloud server has been last notified that FeedLand wants to be pinged when the feed updates. This protocol is part of the RSS 2.0 standard, and is widely supported on the web. However not all feeds support it. So if there is no date or time there, it means the feed doesn't have this support. In either case we check the feed manually periodically for new stuff. Feeds that support rssCloud should update instantly when they change. For feeds that support the protocol, we must renew within 25 hours or the subscription will be cancelled, but we try to do it within 23, because in this case it's better to be a little early. 48 | 49 | ### How fast is the server? 50 | 51 | Secs to read says how long it took the FeedLand server to read the feed. It's usually pretty quick, well under a second, but if the number is higher, that could indicate a problem with the feed, or possibly with the FeedLand server. 52 | 53 | ### Who is subscribed 54 | 55 | Subscribers tells you who is subscribed to this feed. If you click on a name you are taken to their Feed List, where you may get ideas for feeds you want to subscribe to. 56 | 57 | ### Subscribing 58 | 59 | The big blue button at the bottom of the page says either Unsubscribe, if you're subscribed to the feed, or Subscribe if you're not. 60 | 61 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/gettingstarted.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Getting started with FeedLand 2 | 3 | The instructions on this page help you get started in FeedLand, and let you know the limits and features of the system. 4 | 5 | ### What is FeedLand? 6 | 7 | FeedLand is an application that runs in your web browser for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users (both in and outside of FeedLand), and reading and sharing news. 8 | 9 | The goal of FeedLand is to make news a social thing, following the pattern of Twitter and other social media apps, but using open formats and protocols like RSS, OPML and the web. 10 | 11 | So FeedLand is feeds, news and people and software that connects it all together. 12 | 13 | ### Community 14 | 15 | People subscribe to feeds, we squeeze news out of feeds, and shape it into products. 16 | 17 | People can add new feeds. There's a limit of 250 new feeds for each user. 18 | 19 | You can also subscribe to feeds other people have added. No limit there. Subscribe to as many as you like. 20 | 21 | Everyone can see everything. Our lists and categories are there for everyone to use. 22 | 23 | A FeedLand community works together shaping news flows. 24 | 25 | ### How to sign up 26 | 27 | If this is your first time using FeedLand, you'll need to create a new account. 28 | 29 | 1. Go to feedland.org. 30 | 31 | 2. You should see a dialog, with two choices: Sign on, for people who already have an account, and Sign up for new users. 32 | 33 | 3. Click the Sign up button. A new dialog appears, asking you to choose a name and enter an email address. Both must be unique. Messages below each will tell you whether what you have entered can be used. When you're ready, click the Send button. 34 | 35 | 4. Check your email for a confirmation message. Click the link in the email to take you back to FeedLand. If all goes well, you should see your name in the upper right corner of the screen. 36 | 37 | After logging in, you're offered a chance to add some feeds to your empty feed list. It's easier to learn the product with a few feeds you're subscribed to. After they're added you will be taken to your Feed List page. 38 | 39 | You might want to bookmark that page. While you're starting out with FeedLand, it'll be your home page. 40 | 41 | ### Subscribe to some feeds 42 | 43 | Choose Recent users from the first menu. Click on a name to see what they're subscribed to. 44 | 45 | If you see a feed you want to subscribe to, click the checkbox. That's all you have to do. 46 | 47 | Another way to find feeds is to look in the Hotlist or the Subscription log, accessible from the first menu. When you see something you like, click the checkbox next to it. 48 | 49 | To get back to your feed list, choose My feed list from the first menu. 50 | 51 | ### Reading the new stuff 52 | 53 | A quick way to see stories in a feed is to click the wedge next to its name in the feed list. You'll see the titles of the most recent five stories, with links to the full text. If you hover over the link to the story, the description of the story pops up. Screen shot. 54 | 55 | To see the news from all feeds you subscribe to, choose My news from the first menu. 56 | 57 | ### The 250-feed limit 58 | 59 | You can import a feed list from other services, in the Subscribe sub-menu of the first menu, but it's important that you know there's a limit of 250 new feeds per user. 60 | 61 | A new feed is one that no one else is subscribed to. So if you're clicking a checkbox in someone else's feed list, that won't count against your 250 feed limit. 62 | 63 | And at some point we will provide a way to purchase more subscriptions if you run up against the limit. 64 | 65 | ### Nothing is hidden 66 | 67 | Something important about FeedLand. Almost everything is open to everyone. I can see your feed list and you can see mine. I can read the news as you see it and vice versa. 68 | 69 | Obviously only you can sign in as you, that much is secret. But everythiung else is open. 70 | 71 | BTW, you can browse the feeds other users subscribe to, and read the news from those feeds. 72 | 73 | You can only subscribe to feeds if you're signed in. 74 | 75 | ### Exploring, getting help 76 | 77 | Check out the other docs pages to explore the product in more depth. (Links to be added.) 78 | 79 | If you have questions about how to use the product, post an issue in this group. 80 | 81 | asdf 82 | 83 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/goingdeeper.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | 3 | Getting started 4 | 5 | I am running a FeedLand server at feedland.org. There's a small group of people that formed the start of the community. There's room for more, but over time I expect we'll encourage people to start their own communities. I expect the server software will ultimately be available with an open source license. 6 | 7 | How do I use it? 8 | 9 | To get started, log in at feedland.org with your Twitter account. We're just using it for identity, so we have a name for you that's different from everyone else's name. 10 | 11 | Add some feeds to your list by browsing the hotlist, my subscription list, or choose the Add a few feeds command in the Tools menu. 12 | 13 | Once you've done that, let's focus on the heart of the app, your Feed List page. 14 | 15 | Reading feeds 16 | 17 | FeedLand has two basic ways to read the content of feeds -- the river and mailbox views. 18 | 19 | Here's a simple way to compare them. First go to the Feed Info page for Scripting News, my blog. 20 | 21 | When you're viewing a Feed Info page a new menu appears, the View menu, with two choices enabled -- View as river and View as mailbox. 22 | 23 | I've included screen shots below to give an idea. There are benefits to each of the views. At this writing (October 2022) the mailbox view still could use a lot of features, I have focused on the river view. I hope to get some time to add the features soon. 24 | 25 |
26 | 27 |
28 | 29 | Settings 30 | 31 | The Settings command in the System menu opens a tabbed dialog box with settings. The System menu is in the top right corner of the screen. 32 | 33 | The first panel configures Categories. 34 | 35 | The second panel is for News Products. 36 | 37 | The third panel makes it possible to set the URL of the app you use for linkblogging. It's hooked up to the RT icon below each item in the river display. Screen shot. By default the linker app is Radio3, but this setting is there so that you can change it. Any software used for that will hopefully tell you how to make this change. 38 | 39 | The fourth panel -- Misc -- allows you to change some random settings. 40 | 41 | News is the home page. If you check this box, when you go to feedland.org you will be taken to your News page. If you uncheck it, you'll go to your Feed List page. Default is unchecked. 42 | 43 | Show news items in a small box at the top of the screen. If checked, you will get a box through which news scrolls, one story at a time, in realtime. Default is unchecked. Screen shot. 44 | 45 | Block background updates for Feed List page. If checked, the Feed List page won't change unless you reload the page. I needed this for debugging, but you may prefer not to be interrupted by changes, so I left it in. Default is unchecked. 46 | 47 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/newsproducts.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # News products 2 | 3 | A news product is a one-page website you create with FeedLand for people outside of FeedLand to read. 4 | 5 | ### Example 6 | 7 | An example of a news product is mlbriver.com. It's a constantly updated list of news stories about baseball. I created the template to be clean and simple. I could have put the news flow in the middle of a template with other information, or as part of a larger website. 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | ### My news product 12 | 13 | Here's the news product I created for people who read my blog. 14 | 15 | I wanted the page to be on my domain, you I pointed a CNAME record at the my.feedland page. 16 | 17 | The news content is maintained automatically by FeedLand according the feeds you subscribe to and the categories they're assigned to. You define the categories. 18 | 19 | Think of FeedLand as a development system for news products. 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | ### How to 24 | 25 | This is how you can create your own News product. 26 | 27 | 1. In the FeedLand app, choose Settings from the System menu (at the right end of the screen). 28 | 29 | 2. Click on the Categories tab. The third text box is where you define the categories for your news product. Enter a few categories, separated by commas. 30 | 31 | 3. Click on the News Products tab. You can choose a title, description and image to appear at the top of your page. Leave any of these items blank if you don't want to use them. 32 | 33 | 4. You can enter some CSS styles or JavaScript code in the text boxes for CSS and Script. Screen shot. 34 | 35 | 5. When you're done, click OK to save the settings. 36 | 37 | 6. To see what your news product looks like choose My news product from the menu. Screen shot. 38 | 39 | 7. When you're ready to share this, you can give the URL to people outside the FeedLand community. 40 | 41 | ### Advanced forms of News Products 42 | 43 | If all you want to do is one news product, and if your style and script needs are modest, you can stick with the method above. 44 | 45 | But if you need to do more than one, or you want to enter lots of CSS and script code, you can create your news product in an outline, using Drummer, or any outliner that can create OPML with attributes at the head and item levels. 46 | 47 | ### Outline-based news products 48 | 49 | Specify the news product in an OPML file. 50 | 51 | There are four three top-level sections -- tabs, script, style and html. 52 | 53 | Under tabs you list the names of the tabs, and the attributes tell FeedLand how to generate your tabs. 54 | 55 | Under script, enter any JavaScript code you want to run as the news product page is opened. 56 | 57 | Under style, enter any CSS styles that customize the look of the elements that FeedLand puts in the page. 58 | 59 | The html section is a bit more complicated, so I explain it in a separate section below. 60 | 61 | Then feed the OPML file to a web app at products.scripting.com, where it generates the HTML source code for the app. You can iterate over the outline until you're ready to deploy. Then copy the HTML text to your web server, where you serve it as a normal HTML file. 62 | 63 | When I say to "feed" the OPML to the app, what I mean is enter this kind of url in a browser's address bar: 64 | 65 | http://products.scripting.com/?template=http://urloftemplatefile/ 66 | 67 | ### Demo 68 | 69 | The best way to understand is to look at an example of a news product in an outline. 70 | 71 | Here's an OPML file that specifies a news product. Open it in an outliner that understands OPML to use it as a starting point for your news product. 72 | 73 | Here's a link to product.scripting.com that previews this news product. 74 | 75 | And here's the product as deployed on scripting.com. 76 | 77 | And a screen shot of what the demo should look like. 78 | 79 | ### Specifying tabs 80 | 81 | A tab displays the news from a collection of feeds in reverse-chronogic order. They're kind of like blogs but with news from RSS feeds. We also call them rivers of news or just rivers. 82 | 83 | There are three ways to specify the feeds whose items are displayed in the tab. 84 | 85 | As a category. 86 | 87 | As a list of feeds in the outline. 88 | 89 | As an outline include of an OPML subscription list. 90 | 91 | We use all three approaches in the demo setup. 92 | 93 | ### The html section 94 | 95 | In this section of the outline, you can completely re-design the part of the HTML file that products.scripting.com generates that contains the information on the page. You might want to do this if you are including the news product in a site, and have it look like it's part of that site. 96 | 97 | Here's an example of an outline file that has an html section. 98 | 99 | If you completely expand the html section, this is what you'll see. 100 | 101 | You can completely change the HTML here as long as the top element is of class divNewsProduct. 102 | 103 | There are macros pre-defined that allow you to pick up values set elsewhere in the template. 104 | 105 | The news river will be inserted underneath the object whose id is idRiverContent. 106 | 107 | ### Notes 108 | 109 | You should be subscribed to a feed in FeedLand for it to be referenced in a tab. If no one is subscribed to the feed, then no news items will appear for it, because FeedLand won't check it if no one is subscribed. 110 | 111 | You can create a header at the top of the page of your news product by setting the title, description, and image head-level attributes in the outline. Screen shot. 112 | 113 | You can use includes in your outline. 114 | 115 | ### Questions? 116 | 117 | Here's a thread specifically for help with News Products. 118 | 119 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/readingnews.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Reading news in FeedLand 2 | 3 | From reading earlier docs, you know how to manage feeds, subscribe and unsubscribe, and find a few recent items in the feed list. Now we get into reading news. 4 | 5 | In FeedLand we have timelines, which are also called rivers, that show you the latest from feeds you've subscribed to, in reverse-chronologic order, ie newest first. 6 | 7 | These timesline work like the ones in social media apps. Each item has links that allow you to Like an item, or pass a link on to other readers through a feed, or directly to social media apps like Bluesky and Mastodon, view an item on its own page for easier reading, bookmark it, get technical info about an item, or if it has an enclosure, listen to it as a podcast. 8 | 9 | As with other pages in FeedLand, there are lots of useful tool tips and mouse clicks. 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | ### The timeline 14 | 15 | The items are newest-first, grouped by feed. 16 | 17 | The first two items in the list above come from the NYT Technology feed, followed by one from Theater, then two from Asia Pacific news. 18 | 19 | ### Info about each feed 20 | 21 | The top line for each feed shows an icon for the feed, its title, a couple of links and a date. 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | First is a favicon for the feed, provided by a web service run by DuckDuckGo. 26 | 27 | Next is the title of the feed, which is linked to the home page for the feed. 28 | 29 | Then comes the (Feed) link, which connect to the Feed Info page for the feed. 30 | 31 | The right corner of the top line shows the pubDate value from the feed. 32 | 33 | PS: A not-famous feature, if you click the icon, FeedLand will immediately check the feed for new items. 34 | 35 | ### What's in an item? 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | The top line is the item's title. It links to the full article on the web. 40 | 41 | Below that is the description for the item, provided in the feed. 42 | 43 | The bottom line has several bits: 44 | 45 | 1. Thumb-up icon for Liking the item, followed by the count of Likes so far. When you like an item, the count goes up and it is added to the RSS feed of your likes and the feed of all likes for this FeedLand instance. 46 | 47 | 2. RT icon, connects to your linkblogging tool, by default the one built into FeedLand, which will, after editing, be added to your personal feed. 48 | 49 | 3. The document icon, which allows you to read the item on its own page. This is useful for long items, where you want to focus your full attention on reading the story. 50 | 51 | 4. The bookmark icon, which opens the Bookmarks editor with a link to this item already added. You can edit the text, or move it up or down in the list of bookmarked items. 52 | 53 | 5. The Code icon, which opens a dialog with all the data we got from the feed about this item. Useful for debugging, also learning how feeds work. 54 | 55 | 6. The Audio icon, which is enabled if the item had a podcast enclosure. You can listen to the podcast by clicking the icon. 56 | 57 | At the right edge of the bottom line it says how long its been since FeedLand discovered the item. It links to the full article on the web, which is useful if the item doesn't have a title, which would normally link to the item on the web. 58 | 59 | ### How tall items work 60 | 61 | To make a timeline easier to read, FeedLand imposes a maximum height of 150 pixels for the display of an item, but you can view the rest of the item, quickly, by clicking on the text or image in the item. 62 | 63 | When you do this, the item expands to full height. Click it again to make it smaller. 64 | 65 | Here's an example of such an item, before and after expanding. 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/readme.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # FeedLand Docs 2 | 3 | The docs are being updated here, bringing them current, and using them to review the functionality of the product looking for things that need attention. 4 | 5 | For a list of all the docs currently available, look in the Docs menu at the top of each page. 6 | 7 | The docs are rendered from my Glorp outline directly to the website via Dropbox, and kept in sync with the FeedLand Support repo on GitHub. I had initially planned it to go first to the repo, and have the site be a dynamic rendering of the content in the repo, but there were rate limits that I didn't fully understand, and rather than stop to figure it out, I went the other way, which I know works, because I've been using it for many years. 8 | 9 | The actual site that users will see is: docs2.feedland.org. 10 | 11 | ### Updates 12 | 13 | #### 8/3/2023 by DW 14 | 15 | All the non-developer docs are reviewed and in the new Markdown-based format. 16 | 17 | To see the list, look through the menu, at the top of the page. 18 | 19 | Soon they will be in the repo, had to change the way the text flowed, posting directly to GitHub has once again proved not dependable, though more problems were fixed this time around. Eventually we'll get this working properly. 20 | 21 | #### 8/2/2023 by DW 22 | 23 | These pages have been reviewed: 24 | 25 | * Reading news. 26 | 27 | * Your feed list. 28 | 29 | * Feed Info page. 30 | 31 | #### 7/31/2023 by DW 32 | 33 | These pages have been reviewed: 34 | 35 | * Getting started. 36 | 37 | * Categories. 38 | 39 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/settings.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Settings 2 | 3 | The Settings command in the System menu opens a tabbed dialog box with settings. The System menu is in the top right corner of the screen. 4 | 5 | ### Categories 6 | 7 | You can set the categories for all feeds, or the categories that are displayed on your news page, and the categories for your news product. 8 | 9 | ### News products 10 | 11 | The settings on this page are explained in the docs for News products. 12 | 13 | ### Linker 14 | 15 | The third panel makes it possible to set the URL of the app you use for linkblogging. 16 | 17 | When you click the RT icon below each item in a timeline, it opens the Feed editor page, with the title, link and description filled in the edit box. 18 | 19 | If you use a different tool for linkblogging you can enter its URL in this panel. Any software used for that will hopefully tell you how to set this up. 20 | 21 | ### Misc 22 | 23 | This panel allows you to change some random settings. 24 | 25 | * News is the home page. If you check this box, when you go to feedland.org you will be taken to your News page. If you uncheck it, you'll go to your Feed List page. Default is unchecked. 26 | 27 | * Show news items in a small box at the top of the screen. If checked, you will get a box through which news scrolls, one story at a time, in realtime. Default is unchecked. Screen shot. 28 | 29 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/yourfeed.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Your FeedLand feed 2 | 3 | FeedLand takes a social media approach to feeds, like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads. 4 | 5 | Like those products FeedLand is two-way, so in addition to reading, you can also write. 6 | 7 | ### Write your Hello World post 8 | 9 | Choose My feed from the first menu. 10 | 11 | A new page opens with an edit box at the top and a place for a feed of items below. 12 | 13 | Click in the box and type something like Hello World and click the Post button. 14 | 15 | In a moment the message you typed appears below in the list of the feed's items. 16 | 17 | ### The edit box 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | ### Editing text 22 | 23 | To edit the text in an item, click on the text in the list. The text then appears in the edit box. Make changes, when you're ready to publish click the Update button. The text changes both in the feed and in the list. 24 | 25 | If you decide you don't want to save your changes, click the Cancel button. 26 | 27 | Here's a screen shot of the edit box being used to edit an existing item. 28 | 29 | In this mode, the text is not saved to the server as you make changes. 30 | 31 | ### Notes 32 | 33 | If you want more info about the published feed, click the (Feed) link next to the feed title. It will take you to the Feed Info page, which includes the URL of your feed. 34 | 35 | If your username is bullmancuso, this is where your feed would be. 36 | 37 | Here's the Feed Info page for bullmancuso. 38 | 39 | If you want to change the title or description of your blog, choose Settings from the right-most menu, click on the Feed tab and you can edit it there. Screen shot. 40 | 41 | ### The bookmarklet 42 | 43 | Click this link to go to a page that lets you create a bookmarklet for linkblogging with FeedLand. 44 | 45 | Once installed, when you are on a web page that you want to link to from your feed, click the bookmarklet. FeedLand will open in a new tab with the title of the page in the editbox and a link to the page in the link field in the Title, Link & Enclosure section of the editbox. 46 | 47 | If you select text on the page before clicking the bookmarklet, that text will appear in the editbox, and the title of the page will appear in the Title element of the TLE section of the editbox. 48 | 49 | ### Linkblogging from inside FeedLand 50 | 51 | When you're looking at a timeline, there's a icon that's used to post the item to a linkblog. 52 | 53 | When you click that link it will be exactly as if you used the bookmarklet from outside of FeedLand. 54 | 55 | ### Enclosures 56 | 57 | You can link to a media file from the Enclosure element in the Title, Link & Enclosure section. 58 | 59 | When your feed is saved, FeedLand generates an RSS <enclosure> element, including a link to the file, its type and size. 60 | 61 | ### Markdown is just enough HTML 62 | 63 | If you look at a feed, you'll see that the text is saved in the feed in both HTML and Markdown. 64 | 65 | We think more writing apps should support Markdown in feeds, because it would make the feed world richer and safer. 66 | 67 | More info here. 68 | 69 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /docs/yourfeedlist.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Your Feed List 2 | 3 | At the center of your FeedLand world is the Feed List. 4 | 5 | You can get to it by choosing My Feeds in the first menu. 6 | 7 | All the feeds you subscribe to are listed. 8 | 9 | ### Using the list 10 | 11 | You can change the order in which feeds appear by clicking on the column titles. 12 | 13 | From the feed list, you can categorize feeds, read news, see which feeds have recently updated, see who else is subscribed to a feed, see the stats for each feed. There's a lot of functionality packed into this page. 14 | 15 | Also you can read everyone else's feed lists, and subscribe to any of the feeds they're subscribed to. You can quickly see which ones you have already subscribed to with the checkbox next to the feed's title. 16 | 17 | ### Screen shot of a feed list 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | ### Sort order 22 | 23 | You can control the order of the list by clicking on a column head. 24 | 25 | * Title sorts the list alphabetically by its title. 26 | 27 | * When sorts chronologically by when the feed was last updated. 28 | 29 | * Ct sorts on the number of subscribers. 30 | 31 | If you click a header again it reverses the order, so if you were viewing alphabetically, it would switch to reverse-alphabetic. 32 | 33 | ### Each feed has wedge 34 | 35 | Each line starts with a wedge. If you click it, the feed expands to show the five most recent stories in the feed, with a link to the story. Click the wedge again to collapse. 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | If you hover over the link to the story, a description of the story pops up. 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | ### Click a checkbox to subscribe 44 | 45 | Each feed has a checkbox which indicates whether you are subscribed to the feed. 46 | 47 | In your own list all feeds are checked. If you're viewing someone else's list you will probably see some unchecked boxes. 48 | 49 | When you check or uncheck a box the effect takes place immediately. 50 | 51 | ### Click the title for info about the feed 52 | 53 | The third column is the title of the feed. It links to the Feed Info page for the feed, where you can get detailed info about the feed. 54 | 55 | Many of the items have tool tips, for example the feed title has as its tool tip the description of the feed. It's good to have it there because sometimes the feed titles aren't that helpful. 56 | 57 | ### Categorizing a feed 58 | 59 | Immediately after the feed title is a tag icon that connects to the categories dialog for the feed. It will only be present if you're subscribed to the feed. It's dark if you've set some categories, light if you haven't, so you can quickly see which feeds you have still to assign to categories. 60 | 61 | Categories allow you to route items from feeds to different tabs when reading news. You define the categories in the Settings dialog, linked to the menu in the upper right corner of the screen. 62 | 63 | ### How fresh is a feed -- the When column 64 | 65 | The next column, When, says how long it has been since the feed published a new item. When you sort your feed list this way (the default) it's basically a new kind of feed reader, one which I discovered kind of by accident after implementing the feature. It's makes the Feed List page 100 times more useful imho. 66 | 67 | ### How popular is a feed -- the Ct column 68 | 69 | The Ct column says how many people have subscribed to the feed. 70 | 71 | ### The info popup 72 | 73 | If you hover over the green Info icon you can quickly see basic stats about the feed. I found this useful for debugging and left it in, because we're always debugging. ;-) 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | ### Other features of a Feed List page 78 | 79 | The white on orange XML icon is present at the top of many of the pages in FeedLand. It always links to the XML representation of the data on the page you're viewing. In this case, it links to the OPML version of your subscription list. 80 | 81 | The + Feed button brings up a dialog that allows you to enter the URL of a feed to subscribe to. This button is a remnant of earlier versions of FeedLand. Now there's a command in the first menu that does this, and it's present everywhere, not just on the Feed List page. We left it here, because why not. 82 | 83 | The link at the top of the page where it says this is a list of the feeds that davewiner is subscribed to, links to the main news page for the user, where you can see the latest news items from all these feeds. 84 | 85 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------