[ANN] Announcing Gemfeed, an Atom feed tool for Gemini

Greetings, Geminauts!

I had been planning something like this for a while, but the recent
announcement of the "Send the nukes" gemlog prompted me to get off my
butt and actually churn it out.

I am happy to announce that a tool named Gemfeed
(https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/gemfeed) is now ready for preliminary
testing.  Gemfeed's job is to create a single XML file containing an
Atom feed for all the .gmi or .gemini files in a single directory,
except the index.gmi/index.gemini file, if it exists.  It's designed
to be a very easy solution for a simple gemlog which is just a bunch
of .gmi files in a directory, especially when you are using the newly
specced heading line syntax (where h1, h2 and h3 level headings are
lines beginning with #, ## and ###).  You can either run it manually
after each post, or just set a cronjob to run it regularly enough and
then forget about it.  There are options to override the following
behaviour, but by default it uses the first heading it finds in the
index file as the feed's title, and uses the first heading it finds in
every non-index file as the title of an entry in the feed.  Each
entry's update time is set to the corresponding file's creation time
(not modification time, so you can fix minor typos the day after
without your feed changing).  Basically, if you are using headings in
a sensible way, all you need to tell Gemfeed is the URL corresponding
to the directory you're creating a feed for, and it will produce
something sensible.

Full instructions at
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/gemfeed/src/branch/master/README.md.

If you have any kind of periodically updated Gemini content, please
give this a try!  I now plan to immediately begin work on a public
aggregator named CAPCOM (it will be both a tool you can use for your
own aggregation, like moku-pona, and a high-profile public aggregator,
like Bongusta), so the incentive for adopting Gemfeed is that you'll
be able to get your content aggregated there from the earliest days.
Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Whoops, I forgot to mention, Gemfeed depends upon the "FeedGen" library
for Python:

https://github.com/lkiesow/python-feedgen

It's installable via pip with `pip install feedgen`.  I'll make a
setup.py for Gemfeed declaring this dependency as soon as the invetiable
first round of bugs get shaken out by brave volunteers from this list.

Also forgot to mention, if you are using the free Gemini hosting offered
at gemini.circumlunar.space and want to start having feeds generated for
any of your directories, let me know which ones and I'll setup a cron
job for you (which you can't do yourself with only sftp access).

Cheers,
Solderpunk

solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> writes:

> It's installable via pip with `pip install feedgen`. I'll make a
> setup.py for Gemfeed declaring this dependency as soon as the
> invetiable first round of bugs get shaken out by brave volunteers from
> this list.

I've used it to generate a feed for "President Xi, Send The Nukes". Only
issue I notice is that if I pass "-b gemini://carcosa.net/send-the-nukes/"
as the base URL, the feed generates a rel=self for itself of
gemini://carcosa.net/atom.xml, rather than
gemini://carcosa.net/send-the-nukes/atom.xml. The links for all the
other resources are right.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 07:36:44AM -0400, Jason McBrayer wrote:
> 
> I've used it to generate a feed for "President Xi, Send The Nukes". Only
> issue I notice is that if I pass "-b gemini://carcosa.net/send-the-nukes/"
> as the base URL, the feed generates a rel=self for itself of
> gemini://carcosa.net/atom.xml, rather than
> gemini://carcosa.net/send-the-nukes/atom.xml. The links for all the
> other resources are right.

Hmm, are you sure you were including a trailing slash with the base URL?
If you were giving "-b gemini://carcosa.net/send-the-nukes" then I can
see why this would happen, given the standard logic for converting base
and relative URLs to an absolute URL.  I've just pushed a commit which
will add the trailing slash in if it's missing, which would fix that
case.  But if you really were including the slash, then I'm not sure
what's going on...

I also fixed the issue with it picking up your index.gmi.  If you pull
the latest code and regenerate you should at least see that fixed.

Thanks for helping me kick the tyres!

Cheers,
Solderpunk

Gemfeed is now registered at PyPi, so you can install it easily with
pip!  That's one less excuse for not giving it a try. :)

Cheers,
Solderpunk