Tag Archives: rss

Month notes

November 2024 month notes

Rust tools

Rust seems to be becoming the defacto standard for tooling, regardless of the language being used at a domain level. This month I’ve talked to people from Deno who build their CLI with it, switched to the just command runner and ruff code formatter.

It’s an interesting trend in terms of both other languages being more comfortable about not writing their tooling in a different language and why Rust seems to have a strong showing in this area.

Gitlab pipelines

I have been working a lot with Gitlab CI/CD this month, my first real exposure to it. Some aspects are similar to Github Actions, you’re writing shell script in YAML and debugging is hard.

Some of the choices in the Gitlab job environments seems to make things harder than they need to be. By default the job checks out the commit hash of the push that triggered the build in a detached (fetch) mode. Depending on the natural of the commit (in a merge request, to a branch, to the default (main) branch) you seem to get different sets of environment variables populated. Choose the wrong type and things just don’t work, hurrah!

I’ve started using yq as tool for helping validate YAML files but I’m not sure if there is a better structural tool or linter for the specific Gitlab syntax.

Poetry

I’ve also being doing some work with Poetry. As everyone has said the resolution and download process is quite slow and there doesn’t seem to be a huge community around it is a tool. Its partial integration with pyproject.toml makes it feel more standard that it actually is with things under the Poetry key requiring a bit of fiddling to be accessible to other tools. Full integration with the later standard is expected in v2.

Nothing I’ve seen so far is convincing me that it can really make it in its current form. The fragmentation between the pure Python tools seems to have taken its toll and each one (I’ve typically used pipenv) has problems that they struggle to solve.

RSS Feeds

One of the best pieces of advice I was given about the Fediverse was that you need to keep following people until your timeline fills up with interesting things. I’ve been trying to apply that advice to programmers. Every time I read an interesting post I’m now trying to subscribe. Despite probably tripling the number of feeds I have subscribed to my unread view is improved but still dominated by “tech journalism”. I guess real developers probably don’t post that frequently.

Lobsters has been really useful for highlighting some really good writers.

CSS

Things continue to be exciting in the CSS world with more and more new modules entering into mainstream distribution (although only having three browsers in the world is probably helping). I had a little play around with Nested Selectors and while I don’t do lots of pseudo-selectors it is 100% a nice syntax for them. In terms of scoping rules, these actually seem a bit complex but at least they are providing some modularity. I think I’m going to need to play more to get an opinion.

The Chrome developer relations team have posted their review of 2024.

Not only is CSS improving that but Tailwind v4 is actually going to support (or improve support) some of these new features such as containers. And of course its underlying CSS tool is going to be Rust-powered, natch.

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Blogging

RSS Readers for the mobile web

After every social media convulsion there is always a view that we’re heading back to blogs again. Regardless of whether this is true or not there is always an uptick in posting and blogs are definitely better for any kind of long form content compared to a 32 post “thread” on any kind of microblogging social platform. So I’ve been revising my line up of RSS readers (like email I use a few) and I wanted to post my notes on what I’ve tried and what I’ve ended up using.

My first key point of frustration is viewing content on a phone browser. My primary reader (which I migrated to from Google Reader) is Newsblur but the design of the site is not responsive and is large screen focused. My second issue is specifically around Blogger sites, while these do have a mobile view most of the themes for Blogger feel unreadable and harsh on smaller screens. Not to mention the cookie banner that is always floating around.

I have been using Feedbin whose main feature is that it can consolidate content from Twitter, RSS and email newsletters into a single web interface. It does deliver this promise but while its small screen experience and touch interface has been considered, the resulting UI is quite fiddly with a side-swipe scheme for drilling in and out of content and I often need to switch out of its default rendering mode to get something that is easy to read. I’m still using Feedbin to follow news sources on Twitter but have mostly given up on RSS there except indirectly through topic subscriptions.

I want to give an honourable mention here to Bubo RSS. This is essentially a static site builder that reads your subscriptions and builds a set of very lightweight pages that list out all the recent posts and uses the visited link CSS property to indicate the unread items. In the end this didn’t really solve my reading issues as you just link through to the original site rather than getting cleaned up small screen friendly view. However its idea of building a mini-site from your RSS feed and then publishing a static site would solve a lot of my problems. I was almost tempted to see if I could add a pull of the content and a Readability parse but I sense the size of the rabbit hole I was going into.

Another great solution I found was Nom which is a terminal RSS reader written in Go. You put your subscriptions into a config file and then read the content via the terminal. If I had any feedback for Nom it would be that the screen line length is not adjustable and the default feels a bit short. The pure text experience was the best reading experience for the Blogger subscriptions I have but ultimately I wanted something that I could read on a mobile phone web browser.

In the end the thing that has been working for me was Miniflux. You can self-host this but the hosted option seemed cheaper to me than the cost of the required hosting. I had only one issue with Miniflux’s reading mode out of the box which was to do with margins on small screens, I thought I might have to try and get a PR organised but helpfully you can save a custom CSS snippet in the settings and with a few lines of customisation I was entirely happy with the result. This is now what I’m using to read RSS-based content on my phone.

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