#dev 2023-12-06

2023-12-06 UTC
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lockywolf Can someone criticize my "requirements analysis for a good feed reader"? https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-reader.d/index.html
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s​tarrwulfe Here's an example of how I'd like CraftDocs to be the CMS for my site...
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s​tarrwulfe https://starrwulfe.craft.me/blog-post-examples
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IWDiscord <s​tarrwulfe#0>
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[snarfed] lockywolf user req'ts for feed readers are infamously broad and disjoint, ie there are multiple types of users who want drastically different things from a feed reader. an ex Google Reader PM did a famous deep postmortem years ago on this. it's probably more or less impossible to come up with a single list of comprehensive req'ts
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lockywolf [snarfed]: 🤷, well, yeah, but (1) this is why we have lisp and dynamic languages, which can be customized by the user, (2) aiming at a certain group with consistent requirements is still possible
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lockywolf [snarfed]: do you remember any keywords from that post-mortem I can listen to?
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lockywolf *I can find on Google
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[snarfed] sadly no
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[snarfed] and wow yeah "write your own code to change the app" is definitely one approach, but it only works for a veeeery limited audience 😆
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aaronpk Yeah wow the language some software is written in has basically nothing to do with the usability of it in practice
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[0x3b0b] You know, I can remember thinking about what I'd like in a feed reader on a few occasions, and never getting anywhere with it. I think what it boils down to is that the itches I have with using the RSS/Atom support built into my email client (currently Vivaldi), and (these days) the inbox of my Microblogpub instance, are insufficient to motivate meaningful effort put toward any of the improvements I might like.
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lockywolf aaronpk: I am an Emacs user :)
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lockywolf I have _a lot_ of hooks in my ~/.emacs.d/
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lockywolf it is true that you can patch almost all open source software to run your functions whenever needed
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[KevinMarks] Was it this? https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-kill-Google-Reader
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[KevinMarks] Brian also wrote about it here https://web.archive.org/web/20130317103508/https://www.brianshih.com/post/30194495552/reader-redesign-terrible-decision-or-worst-decision
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[Murray] @lockywolf an interesting list for sure, definitely some stuff in there I wouldn't consider necessary features _for me_ (such as the address book and sharing), and probably missing a couple I'd require "table stakes" (again, for me): easy annotation and customisable export formats (a bonus if keyboard shortcuts also tie into this)
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[Murray] Rather than try to explain exactly what I mean, I'd say take a look at the feature set of Readwise's "Reader" app, which is the closest thing I've found to what I want, and the current reader that I use. I'd love it to do some things differently, and there's features in there I'll never use (funnily, the Readwise integration is probably top of that list) but it's "close enough" for now
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lockywolf "Readerwise Reader"?
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lockywolf found it
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lockywolf does look like people who are doing it know what they are doing
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lockywolf doesn't seem to be self-hosted though
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[Murray] No, I don't believe so, but to me that's a feature if you will 😄 I do not want that hassle
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lockywolf [Murray]: nice suggestion, thank you
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[Murray] no worries. One of the nicer aspects is that there are automated export options to other, more open tools like Obsidian. Personally I export to Markdown, then import to my own site, but I'm considering setting up some automated path just for a backup
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lockywolf well, I am mostly interested in importing from other sources
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aaronpk anyone tried this before? https://chyrplite.net/
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aaronpk "An ultra-lightweight blogging engine, written in PHP"
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[schmarty] ooo
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aaronpk i'm gonna do a trial run with it to see how i like it, but then I might start filing issues for indieauth and micropub :D
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[schmarty] i look forward to peeking at the codebase. i'm coming back around to my project from last year to port all my lil hackathon micropub projects from glitch to PHP to make a common PHP-indieweb-micropub-thing framework or project template. i've muddled through using it on a handful of things and generally am able to make stuff work, but it's still not nearly intuitive, haha.
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aaronpk i just really want to be able to spin up a blog without a lot of fuss
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aaronpk but then i also want it to have features like tags, micropub, etc
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aaronpk and then things quickly spiral out of control and i've rebuilt wordpress
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GWG aaronpk: Even WordPress is out of control
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[schmarty] wordpress has rebuilt wordpress
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aaronpk true
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GWG [schmarty]: That makes me the squatter who is refusing to sell out after the rest of the neighborhood has sold out to urban redevelopment? Like the couple in Batteries Not Included?
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[schmarty] dang i love that movie
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GWG We need a Carlos, I guess
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[snarfed] hey [manton] does http://micro.blog use a service to poll and import RSS feeds? or do you do that polling yourself?
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[snarfed] (background: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/550 )
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[manton] [snarfed] I do the polling myself.
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[snarfed] wow, ok!
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[KevinMarks] Are monocle/aperture under a lot of load today? I'm seeing lag when I click a topic
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aaronpk i've been getting traffic alerts
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aaronpk i haven't looked into it much
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[KevinMarks] Clicking a monocle topic takes ~30 seconds to switch to the new page and ~3 minutes to load the post content and show the "read more" bar
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aaronpk weird, it's not doing that for me
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[jamietanna] Yeah I've been seeing that too in the last couple of hours, via IndiePass
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[KevinMarks] I can try it on desktop and run a trace, this was mobile on WiFi
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aaronpk oh wow the cpu is holding steady at 50%, that usually doesn't happen
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aaronpk nevermind apparently that's exactly the average
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[manton] [snarfed] If you’re curious, as a coincidence I actually just made a little diagram of http://Micro.blog’s architecture… The three “app server” boxes handle both web traffic for the platform and also background tasks. They are always polling RSS feeds. Usually it tries to poll a feed every few minutes, unless there are errors or other problems in which case it backs off. There are a couple quirks and optimizations but nothing too f
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[manton] https://www.manton.org/2023/12/06/made-a-little.html
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Loqi [preview] [Manton Reece] Made a little architecture diagram for Micro.blog that reflects the recent server upgrades. A couple simplifications but it’s pretty close to how things work.
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aaronpk i really need to improve my back-off logic for feeds that are erroring
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[manton] Mine isn’t too clever. I think it basically just slows down, checking maybe once an hour. And in extreme cases once a day for weird things that look broken.
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[manton] Like “HTTP gone” I think it doesn’t completely stop checking.
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[snarfed] thanks [manton]! really useful to hear. roughly how many feeds total are you polling right now?
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aaronpk fwiw i'm polling about 7000 feeds right now
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[manton] [snarfed] Hmm, I’m not totally sure… Looking… There are over a million feeds in the database (for some reason!) but it’s checking a much smaller number. There are records for feeds of Mastodon accounts and other things that aren’t polled. It avoids polling the Micro.blog-hosted feeds because it knows when those change. Looks like roughly 55k are the type of feed that it tries to poll regularly. That might be off but it’s in the b
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[manton] http://Micro.blog feeds are still downloaded, but only when a blog post is published so I don’t count that as polling.
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[manton] In other words, create new blog post → download the feed → mark the feed as not needing to be polled again until something else changes.
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[snarfed] polling 55k feeds every few min is a lot! something like 200qps of feed fetching and processing, phew
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[snarfed] I'm guessing you maybe have more frequency tiers that are slower
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[tantek] anyone using CSS grid on. your website, e.g. home page? add yourself to https://indieweb.org/grid#IndieWeb_Examples
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[manton] [snarfed] Yeah, I don’t have a good sense of the different tiers without scripting some kind of report… Each feed basically keeps track of how often the polling interval is and when the next download should approximately be.
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[snarfed] thanks! good inspiration for me to maybe do that polling in BF myself instead of finding a Superfeedr replacement
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gRegor what is chirp?
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "chirp" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "chirp is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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gRegor Hm I thought we had that
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gRegor what is perch
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Loqi Perch Runway is a content management system with a monthly license fee, built on PHP and MySQL. It was formerly offered in two flavors with Perch being for smaller sites and Perch Runway for sites which have large collections of content https://indieweb.org/Perch
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gRegor Maybe that was it
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gRegor Similar letters, different order xD
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[tantek] lol do you mean this gRegor? https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/twitter-is-bringing-back-its-long-lost-chirp-developer-conference-in-november/
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gRegor haha, no, I'm thinking of a PHP CMS
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