Read Your Favourite Hive Blogs via RSS

Back when blogging was the decentralized social media, we used to consume each other's articles via RSS.

We would have conversations across blog posts, quoting and responding. It was a heck of a time.

Then social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook took over. Instead of linking out we would retweet or quote tweet.

The time of the TL;DR was upon is, instead of reading articles we would respond to clickbait headlines. Social media became an anger delivery system.

Finally, Google Reader was put to sleep, and the world moved on.

BUT, feeds and fead readers still exist!

Turns out there is a nice service called https://feeder.co/ that has a browser extension that makes it easy to add feeds to your collection and read them all in one place.

You don't even need an account to get started!

While I am a fan of Peakd, as a consumption tool I don't think it is quite as efficient as using a good feed reader, so here we get the best of both worlds.

IFTTT

Feeds are not just for humans, feed reading can also be done by bots which makes plumbing services together much easier.

Perhaps you would like a text message next time your favorite crypto game blog posts an update?

Or next time a creator mints a new NFT?

Want to backup your articles?

Perhaps tweet and share on Facebook when YOU post next?

Simply add your RSS feed as the trigger and choose if you want to take an action based on any new item or filter the feed looking for specific words.

To take the Tweet as an example, when you set up the Tweet action you can craft your own message to accompany the data:

Your Tweet can pull from any of the ingredients provided by the RSS feed processing:

My Hive to RSS tool

To turn a Hive blog into a feed, just add the name to the end of the URL here:

https://omiq.ca/Hive/rss.py?blog=makerhacks

In this case obviously I have supplied my own blog, but to read Marky's blog just change makerhacks to themarkymark.

I just created it so there are lots of things I would like to do, consider it not even an alpha test, but I would love to hear what you think.

One of the big things I will need to do if people actually like this is ensure I am caching results and probably move it to a more performant server, but right now there is just me using it so my cheap $5/mo virtual machine will suffice.

Another thing I need to do is extract the first image in the post to use as a feature image so that you can get a better thumbnail and for use in things like Facebook and Twitter syndication.

Too many ideas and not enough time!

Buld Your Own

If you are curious, all of this is pretty simple to build using Python (and I am sure easy enough to do in Node etc too).

The secret? There is a Python module called RFeed!

Yeah, bet your mind is blown ;)

feed = Feed( 
	title = "Sample RSS Feed", 
	link = "http://www.example.com/rss", 
	description = "This is an example of how to use rfeed", 
	language = "en-US", 
	lastBuildDate = datetime.datetime.now(), 
	items = [item1, item2]) 
 
# Print out the feed! 
print("Content-Type: text/html\n\rAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *\n\r") 
print(feed.rss())