[HN Gopher] Show HN: MergeFeed - Paste a bunch of links to creat...
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Show HN: MergeFeed - Paste a bunch of links to create a multifeed
Author : amadeuspagel
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-08-24 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mergefeed.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (mergefeed.net)
| monkeydust wrote:
| So this could be interesting.
|
| I get asked fairly frequently at work what blogs / newsletters /
| sites I read to keep on topic X.
|
| Could I use this to create a feed for topic X sourced from what I
| read and then share the merged feed with others ?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Yes.
| cristoperb wrote:
| I wrote a little Python service which combines multiple rss/atom
| feeds into a single feed, in case anyone wants to host their own
| API for doing that:
|
| https://github.com/cristoper/feedmixer
| ms123 wrote:
| If you're looking for feeds, have a look at
| https://nightfall.city
| owlrobot wrote:
| Thank you so much, I love this. Going to try to make a Python
| script to automatically put links in it and run it.
| Wronnay wrote:
| A bit more text describing the app on the website would be great
| - I wasn't thinking about RSS first...
| girriPal wrote:
| Neat!
| imwillofficial wrote:
| A readability nightmare
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| So it extracts RSS feeds from websites?
|
| https://mergefeed.net/WFH?urls=https://wfhjobs.us/
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Yes, it uses RSS autodiscovery.
| spookybones wrote:
| I like this. Text is too large when viewing on my phone though.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Just made it smaller. (You won't immidiately see the result due
| to caching.)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I shall give my usual plea (for the OP and feed authors alike):
| except for podcasts, please deal in Atom rather than RSS if you
| have a choice. Let RSS die. Outside of podcasting software,
| everything supports both, and Atom is the technically superior
| format, including resolving various unspecified behaviour that
| _does_ lead to inconsistency across clients, such as with respect
| to HTML markup in titles (which RSS has no answer for, so that
| one way or the other all clients will mangle some titles that
| contain <) and in content (where the main but far from
| ubiquitously used RSS answer is to leave a blank <description> or
| <summary> or whatever it is, and use the <encoded> element from
| the http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/ namespace).
|
| For this project, that would mean emitting Atom rather than RSS.
| And possibly the autodiscovery needs tweaking too, as I observe
| it not finding the feed on my site https://chrismorgan.info/,
| which is properly specified; my first guess is that it's not
| coping with the type=application/atom+xml attribute.
|
| In related news, MergeFeed is currently vulnerable to injection
| attacks because it mishandles Atom titles that are specified as
| text. If you specify a title as HTML or XHTML, it filters out a
| <script> element properly (good! and while retaining inline
| formatting too!), but if you specify a title as text, it doesn't
| escape the HTML (which is what it should do) or filter it (which
| would have been wrong but would at least have closed the security
| vulnerability). Proof of concept:
| https://mergefeed.net/-?urls=https://temp.chrismorgan.info/x...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > And possibly the autodiscovery needs tweaking too, as I
| observe it not finding the feed on my site
| https://chrismorgan.info/, which is properly specified; my
| first guess is that it's not coping with the
| type=application/atom+xml attribute.
|
| I fixed that:
| https://mergefeed.net/Untitled?urls=https://chrismorgan.info...
|
| > In related news, MergeFeed is currently vulnerable to
| injection attacks because it mishandles Atom titles that are
| specified as text. If you specify a title as HTML or XHTML, it
| filters out a <script> element properly (good! and while
| retaining inline formatting too!), but if you specify a title
| as text, it doesn't escape the HTML (which is what it should
| do) or filter it (which would have been wrong but would at
| least have closed the security vulnerability). Proof of
| concept:
| https://mergefeed.net/-?urls=https://temp.chrismorgan.info/x...
|
| I fixed that too. But for now I wasn't able to fix it without
| also removing formatting. I might be able to figure out how to
| keep formatting without allowing XSS attacks later, but I'm not
| sure that's even a good idea. It's kind of a link aggregator
| and link aggregators generally don't allow formatting. You
| don't want people to try to gain attention that way, leading to
| an arms race.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I think that autodiscovery is only finding the first feed.
| Since you're aggregating feeds, I'd expect it to find all
| feeds on all pages. Sample page with multiple feeds:
| https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/fun/ has the site-wide
| feed and then the tag-specific feed. I say only "I think" at
| the start of this comment because the entries in the second
| feed are a subset of the entries in the first, though it has
| a different feed ID and title, and I can imagine it
| _possibly_ merging them.
|
| Losing formatting makes me a little bit sad. The widespread
| idea that titles are necessarily plain unformatted text is
| just _bad_. Italics especially are very regularly useful.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > I think that autodiscovery is only finding the first
| feed.
|
| Yes.
|
| > Since you're aggregating feeds, I'd expect it to find all
| feeds on all pages.
|
| No, I don't think that would be useful. For example, a lot
| of blogs have autodiscovery for a feed of all posts and for
| a feed of all comments on their homepage. But if I want to
| create a multifeed of several blogs, I only want the posts.
|
| Generally, the way I expect autodiscovery to work is that a
| link to the most specific applicable feed comes first. For
| example on the page for the tag "fun", the feed for the tag
| fun should come first, because that's most likely what
| people are looking for on that page. If they wanted the
| general feed, they'd go to the homepage.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Some multifeeds based on blogrolls:
|
| - Marginal Revolution:
| https://mergefeed.net/Marginal_Revolution_Blogroll?urls=http...
|
| - Crooked Timber:
| https://mergefeed.net/Crooked_Timber_Blogroll?urls=http://11...
|
| - Naked Capitalism:
| https://mergefeed.net/Naked_Capitalism_Blogroll?urls=http://...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Some multifeeds based on topics:
|
| - Cyber Security:
| https://mergefeed.net/Cyber_Security_Blogs?urls=http://krebs...
|
| - Economics:
| https://mergefeed.net/Economics_Blogs?urls=http://econbrowse...
| mkl wrote:
| I'm pretty confused about the concept. Is it supposed to look
| like this? https://imgur.com/a/4A52Wer
|
| How is such a busy overwhelming feed useful?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I guess that's how it looks on mobile. I've thought about
| making it look different on mobile, but on the other hand
| maybe on mobile it's especially useful to get a dense list of
| 20 links? I don't use my phone much so I find it hard to
| judge.
| basch wrote:
| Time, indents, linewrap, and padding between lines may
| help.
|
| https://techmeme.com/river and https://hckrnews.com/ are
| good clean inspiration.
| beardyw wrote:
| Sorry to sound like an idiot, but what would I want this for?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| - If you want to stay up to date on a topic, make a multifeed
| for it. Just google "topic blogs", click on a result that looks
| good and paste it into mergefeed.
|
| - If you come across a blogroll (or any list of blogs) you're
| interested in, you can turn it into a multifeed.
|
| - If you have a bookmarks folder with blogs or podcasts, you
| can paste it into mergefeed to turn it into a multifeed.
| beardyw wrote:
| Mmm ... Thanks for the explanation, but it just feels like
| half of a feed reader (not removing articles read etc). And
| the format gives me a headache.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Stick it in your favourite reader (eg phone app)
|
| That said Feeder didn't like the URL in URL format and
| barfed on this because it has Twitter in it. I think OP
| needs to URL encode the params.
|
| https://mergefeed.net/Cyber_Security_Blogs?urls=http://kreb
| s...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I've thought about encoding the params, but that would
| make it harder for humans to read and edit.
| remram wrote:
| Why not just put those feed in your RSS reader? What does
| the extra step add?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The only reason I can think it's a handy way to share an
| aggregation
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's not intended to replace your feed reader if you
| already have one, but even then it's still useful to
| discover and share feeds.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I feel compelled to mention FraidyCat[0], which is offered as a
| desktop app. It groups posts by feed/individual, with a mini
| activity bar next to each. It also groups feeds by the specified
| intensity of your follow (real-time to occasional).
|
| [0] https://fraidyc.at
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(page generated 2021-08-24 23:03 UTC)