[HN Gopher] Experimental blog that is only available to read thr...
___________________________________________________________________
Experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed
reader
Author : 8organicbits
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-05-03 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theunderground.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (theunderground.blog)
| miduil wrote:
| Great part is you can also style the rss feeds with with `.css`
|
| https://interconnected.org/home/feed
|
| https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-...
| joneil wrote:
| I never realised this - thanks!
|
| It feels like by adding styling I could make those who click on
| the "feed" link, but don't yet know what RSS is have a much
| better experience than seeing unstyled XML and being confused.
| genmon wrote:
| thanks for sharing! I also run https://www.aboutfeeds.com which
| is a simple "explainer" for those new to RSS
|
| the limitation of feed styling is that it requires custom http
| headers: Content-Type: application/xml;
| charset=utf-8 # not application/rss+xml x-content-type-
| options: nosniff
|
| and so it doesn't work on GitHub Pages, which is otherwise my
| go-to for building + hosting static sites.
|
| so... if anyone from GitHub is reading this, please make it
| possible to tweak the page headers! (and if you know anyone
| there, please pass on this request :)
| arccy wrote:
| or you can use XSLT, no headers required
| https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3770-using-xslt-and-xml-
| transf...
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is the same as tdarb.org's "Shinobi Website" phase[0]. For
| more information see [1].
|
| Sadly, tdarb.org is dead, but the HN link[1] is not.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220523124655/https://tdarb.org...
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31372373
| javajosh wrote:
| I guess its time to make a blog that's only available to read
| through ssh now.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Nothing's stopping you.
|
| Or you could just run a blog on the Gemini protocol.
|
| Either is fine.
| hyperorca wrote:
| You can even start selling coffee there, while you're at it.
| sujayk_33 wrote:
| someone's already doing that LoL
| tentacleuno wrote:
| https://terminal.shop :)
| wffurr wrote:
| Do you mean a .plan and .project file for finger?
| surfingdino wrote:
| Go mTLS, go hardcore.
| anthk wrote:
| SDF has blogs over gopher://
|
| gopher://sdf.org/1/phlogs
|
| And often, if not usually, or always, the gopher content
| outmatches the web sites as maintaing a gopher blog it's dead
| easy compared to the web. No styles, you can post via a script,
| images would just placed as a link in the end, or under an
| images/ directory to be read later.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| As someone that considers images to be really important to
| most things I'm interested in, that completely sucks. As does
| Gemini for that matter.
|
| Otherwise I do actually quite like the idea of a protocol
| that is styled by the user agent, not the creator.
| anthk wrote:
| A lot of Gemini clients will inline the images, such as
| Lagrange. Not an issue as you would have with Gopher.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| A lot... but what percentage? I'd want a protocol that
| recognised the semantic relation of images to text, and
| clients should follow that.
| anthk wrote:
| With Gemini, even with terminal clients you can open the
| _inlined_ images in a typical blog on a gemini capsule
| with a fast external viewer, such as sxiv with you just
| can fullscreen with 'f' and q with 'q'. In the case of
| gopher, it's either a directory with a gophermap, or a
| text file with the content. You can't have two at the
| same time. Using a gophermap directory as a fake text
| post it's a bit of a hack abusing the 'i' item, and it
| can look really bad on some older clients.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _the idea of a protocol that is styled by the user agent_
|
| You mean a markup language styled by the user agent? And it
| could be served by a stateless request protocol, so all
| requests are equivalent? We could call them JCML and JCTP,
| I guess...
| thejohnconway wrote:
| You're being snarky, but here's a serious answer. I don't
| see what relevance statelessness has to do with it, so
| I'll leave that aside.
|
| The 'problem' with HTML is that it's lacking a lot of
| features we now realise we want, and at the same time is
| flexible enough with CSS and JavaScript for people to
| solve them in their own ways. This had led to a
| proliferation of approaches, and stuff can't be automated
| or make accessible reliably. It also makes creation more
| complicated than it needs to be.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Fair enough, my apologies (and I'll leave the other aside
| too).
|
| I guess where we differ is not in the identification of
| the problem, but you think an improved markup language
| might be a solution, and I think any solution would
| necessarily be more social than technical?
| codetiger wrote:
| BYOF - Bring your own frontend
| flir wrote:
| That sounds a lot more fun than Gemini, tbh.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's basically just an API then?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| It's delivered in HTML embedded in XML, instead of pure HTML or
| some JavaScript/HTML-shenanigan. Not really an API.
| Gormo wrote:
| No, it's just an Atom feed, with no corresponding HTML page. No
| APIs are really involved.
| superkuh wrote:
| There was a military analysis site with free and paid versions.
| For 7 years running if you subscribed to the RSS feed you
| received the full paid content in the feeds for free. It was
| great. Eventually enough people must have been clicking "paid"
| links to paid resources (pdfs, images, etc) in the feed content
| that they noticed and stopped providing full post content in RSS
| (for free and paid).
| lasermike026 wrote:
| This works.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one
| reads what they write. Doesn't this make it worse?
| xandrius wrote:
| I guess the situation is so bad that a gimmick like this might
| actually help.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| I have a lot of feeds in my reader, but I don't add feeds
| without first seeing the content on the Web. This gimmick is
| nothing special to me. For someone who doesn't use feeds, I
| doubt they would start doing so for a mystery meat blog.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I imagine the author has baked in that people who don't use
| feeds won't use a blog that requires it be read as a feed.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It absolutely does. I can't share a link to a post, so
| spreading the word about the blog's existence is pretty hard.
| Retr0id wrote:
| That's only a problem if your goal is to be read by as many
| people as possible.
| Closi wrote:
| Or if your goal is that interested parties can find and
| access it easily.
|
| Otherwise why make it a blog and not just a private document?
| Retr0id wrote:
| But it's not private?
| antiframe wrote:
| By adding addition friction, one reduces that
| 'accessibility'. Adding unnecessary friction by doing
| extra work setting something up as feed-only so that
| readers have to do extra work to decide if the feed-only
| content is worthwhile, the question I have is 'why?'
|
| Subscribing to a site sight unseen, no pun intended, is
| not something I or anyone who is protective of their feed
| inbox would do. I curate my feeds so that I can sit down
| a few times a week and deeply read.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Precisely, that's the whole point.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Or if you're publishing helpful reference material.
|
| I am under no illusion that my content is popular... but if I
| spend the better part of a weekend trying to get a config
| file working for a poorly documented tool, I'll share it
| knowing that low double digit number of people will google
| and find it.
|
| Content exclusively behind rss is like tech support
| exclusively on discord. Discoverability approaches zero.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author
| specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a
| 90s-style personal site instead of posting things to social
| media or Medium or whatever. She observed that she's grown
| tired of the modern Web's obsession with accumulating Whuffie
| (my choice of words, not hers), and thinks it's probably an
| emotional net negative. With a personal site, she feels freer
| to treat her Web presence as a personal project that she does
| purely for her own personal satisfaction. And, because of that,
| she gets more joy out of it. She specifically called out that
| she doesn't have any traffic counters because she feels she's
| better off not worrying about that.
|
| For my part, I also enjoyed browsing her site more than I do
| modern blogs. It was a refreshing reminder of what the Internet
| was like back when spending hours browsing it was called
| "surfing", and the term "doomscrolling" hadn't been invented
| yet. I'm seriously considering creating my own Neocities site
| (or similar). If I do, I won't be worrying about engagement
| metrics, either.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| The 90s style is certainly a fun marvel to me, but I think
| Neocities is an easy place to set up a modern site built with
| static site generators. I built my own non-90s blog with
| Jekyll and use the Neocities CLI to update the site.
| Gormo wrote:
| Cloudflare Pages is also a decent option. They offer
| completely free static site hosting.
| debo_ wrote:
| I do this too. I have a Gemini gemlog with an http proxy in
| front, and I write up a little summary of my posts each
| quarter and email it to a group of ~30 people I like to keep
| in touch with. I do this in place of having social media.
| urban_alien wrote:
| What's the link to her blog?
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I think that sharing a link to her site on a high traffic
| venue like Hacker News might be contrary to the author's
| wishes.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I much prefer the "homepage" model over the "blog" model. A
| blog and the ecosystem around blogs has an implicit need for
| constant content. Blogs are typically displayed by feed
| readers sorted by time. If you don't post for some period of
| time your content will fall out of view. If blogging isn't
| your main interest it's fucking tiring.
|
| A homepage can feel _finished_. You build some pages around
| your interests and can stop. You don 't need to be a
| "blogger", you can just share your interests. A homepage
| doesn't even need tending. It can just be a self contained
| thing. You _can_ constantly update it but you don 't need to.
|
| Unfortunately Google punishes any content that wasn't
| published recently. In order to just be _found_ by most
| people you have to jump on the content generation treadmill.
| It 's commendable when services like NeoCities bubble up
| existing content to new viewers. Same with Marginalia which
| does a good job finding content based on your search terms
| and not the fact it carries their ad network and claims to
| have been updated in the last nanosecond.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Yeah, seriously, the nostalgia for blogs is understandable,
| but I remember feeling they were ruining the internet.
| People used to have site laid out with categorised pages
| that were linked together. A bit like a personal Wikipedia.
| They would occasionally edit pages and keep up to date.
| Blogs replaced that with a chronological layering short
| posts. Bloggers feel pressure for little and often. They
| are not a good way to read about a subject (Wikipedia isn't
| a blog!).
| derefr wrote:
| > Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by
| time. If you don't post for some period of time your
| content will fall out of view.
|
| I've never used an (RSS/Atom) feed reader that would just
| barf every post of every blog into a single top-level feed.
| Feed readers, almost by definition of the genre, are
| programs that give you a sidebar with a hierarchy of
| subscribed feeds, grouped into categories (where a given
| feed can appear under multiple categories), and with unread
| counts beside each category and feed. You can then scroll
| through a category, or a specific blog. There usually isn't
| even an option to scroll through "everything" (though I
| guess you could do this by having every feed in the same
| category.)
|
| And personally, I don't think I've ever bothered scrolling
| through a category, either. I usually just decide what
| category I feel like looking at; notice a few blogs in it
| that are badged as unread, that I haven't looked at in a
| while; click into them; look at the few newest (or oldest)
| posts; and then _maybe_ mark the rest as read if I feel
| like reading those few "caught me up."
|
| It's basically the same flow as if the feed posts were
| emails in an email client, sorted into individual per-blog
| folders.
|
| In short: what are you talking about?
|
| > You can constantly update it but you don't need to.
|
| The thing that confuses me about the "homepage" website
| style -- and has since the 90s, when I was maintaining one
| of my own! -- is: how do I present content that I _am_
| constantly adding bits and bobs to it, in such a way that
| people can discover that the content is evolving, and go
| look at it?
|
| Like, picture a "homepage"-style site, with one page
| showing off the author's rock collection, and another page
| with lines from famous rap battles. I can browse this at my
| leisure the _first_ time I visit, and enjoy it, and that 's
| great. But say I do that, and bookmark the site, and then I
| come back to it again a year later.
|
| Am I expected to just click through to each page again?
| Find the new rocks among the existing rocks, and the new
| quotes among the existing quotes? I don't think I'd bother.
| ( _Maybe_ I would if they were added chronologically to the
| bottom over time. The original "Evil Overlord list" was a
| site that grew like this. But most sites just slotted new
| stuff in alphabetiacally, or some other even-more-obscure
| way. The Jargon File always bothered me for this reason.)
|
| Presuming the author has added stuff since then, they
| likely did that because they want me (and their other
| "fans") to see it; but due to the lack of discoverability,
| I'm never going to. I feel like there's got to be some
| solution to this problem that _doesn 't_ involve just
| reinventing the modern web.
|
| Maybe a changelog, right there on the home page? I've seen
| "homepage"-style sites with these before. (Usually they use
| unstyled HTML4 tables.)
|
| But if I picture a "homepage" with a changelog... and I
| take that and automate the process of _producing_ the
| changelog from the changes (as any programmer would feel
| the urge to do)... and I get annoyed at how mechanistic and
| opaque the changelog entries are, so I modify the workflow
| so that each change collects a plaintext "commit message"
| from me along with the change... then I feel like the
| results would just gradually converge into looking and
| acting like a blog. A blog that links to static "shrine"
| pages, sure! But still, the site's "spine" would be a blog.
| Disappointing.
|
| But maybe the "homepage"-idiomatic approach, would be to
| have a changelog _per page_ , rather than one global one?
| It feels less blog-like, yes; and I've definitely seen 90s
| websites that do this as well, each page being its own
| standalone "document" including its own embedded revision
| history. (RFCs are such documents.)
|
| My issue with _that_ , is that it'd kind of suck for being
| able to visit the site and find out whether there _was_
| anything changed since you last looked over everything.
|
| Feels like you'd need a separately-maintained email
| newsletter?
|
| Or perhaps some kind of indexer that regularly spiders
| these sites, scrapes the revision logs from each page (or
| just deltas them from previous versions), and then either
| spits out an RSS feed -- or exposes a special kind of
| search engine that allows you to search any given website
| for its newest pages, taking a URL and outputting the
| site's pages ordered by last-modified date descending.
| Ideally with some heuristic that synthesizes some optimum
| between a summary of the page, and a highlight of its most
| recent change.
|
| ...but then, isn't _that too_ a blog?
| khrbrt wrote:
| "Whuffie" is a reference to the Cory Doctorow novel _Down and
| Out in the Magic Kingdom_. It 's set a post-scarcity society,
| Whuffie acts as a sort of currency and is earned from clout
| and social status. The protagonist goes from being wealthy in
| Whuffie to destitute and needs to earn his way back up.
|
| I read it a long time ago as a weird story. Might be time for
| a reread.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King.
| ..
| darreninthenet wrote:
| And if they want it read, they need to write something to
| read... this experimental blog has made four posts, the last
| one in January.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Curious which impact this will have on the web-crawler. Will they
| ignore it? Will they push it, as they have subscribed themselves
| to the feed? Or will they experience a divide by zero-situation
| and go bonkers?
| Retr0id wrote:
| > I'm sorry about using a non-spec compliant ID on the entries,
| but there are no URLs for blog posts to set it to.
|
| Assuming they're just arbitrary IDs, using urn:uuid: might be a
| more compliant version of the same idea
| https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-uuidrev-rfc4122bi...
| jtvjan wrote:
| Just gotta add a nice XSLT stylesheet to that feed.xml and people
| with only web browsers can also enjoy the blog.
|
| ex1: https://darekkay.com/atom.xml ex2:
| https://feeds.nos.nl/nosnieuwsalgemeen
| chrismorgan wrote:
| You can very practically make this viewable in normal web
| browsers if you give it an XSLT stylesheet, and preferably use
| <content type="xhtml"> instead of <content type="html"> so that
| you don't even need any JavaScript to unescape things (grumble
| grumble, disable-output-escaping, grumble grumble, messy
| unmaintained XML pipelines with ancient feature support, grumble
| grumble).
|
| Here's a sample, having taken this feed.xml, switched it to
| <content type="xhtml">, and added my own stylesheet:
| https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml
|
| There's all kinds of fun stuff you can then add, such as
| pagination as you get more entries, rather than just deleting old
| ones. I'd suggest adding actual links using the fragment and
| xml:id attribute (mapped to HTML id in the stylesheet), but that
| wouldn't play nicely with pagination shifting entries.
|
| You can even do things like publish an Atom entry document for
| each entry, so they have their own paths, but that that URL is
| still an Atom document. Basically, if you want to, you can
| _completely_ realistically have a full blog where everything is
| in Atom containers instead of HTML containers.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| An extension like Feed Preview also works well:
| https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That's user-side. Giving the feed a stylesheet works for
| _everyone_ , not requiring that they install an extension
| first.
| internetter wrote:
| You can even do it without switching the content type:
| https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That applies a CSS stylesheet to the XML tree directly, which
| has serious limitations: you can't make links, you don't get
| a document title, you don't get a useful accessibility tree,
| you can't change the order of the tree...
|
| I would always recommend using an XSL transformation first,
| in order to avoid these limitations.
| giantrobot wrote:
| While XML and its ecosystem has faults, I love the model where
| annotated/hinted serialized data is sent to the client. The
| user agent is in charge of deciding how to display that data.
| It doesn't need a mountain of arbitrary third party code to
| display that data.
|
| I've done the "transform XML with XSLT in the browser" a few
| times before and it worked pretty well. Writing the XSLT was a
| pain in the ass because the tooling to do so sucked but once it
| was written it just worked.
|
| It even worked inside JavaScript since that could just grab
| that XML, ignore the stylesheet, then proceed because it was
| just an XHR. The modern JSON based equivalent is just an under
| specified mess.
|
| XML is actually pretty cool and useful. I find JSON to be a
| poor replacement.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| Oh man, XSLT stylesheets. I remember working with that for a
| templating engine for a college project. But I've haven't dealt
| with web programming since just before the iPhone achieved mass
| popularity. Is XSLT still a thing?
| dmorgan81 wrote:
| I doubt it's still used much in web programming, but for
| backend data processing there are plenty of systems that
| output XML. XSLT is a great resource when you need to
| simplify a gnarly document.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| They come up sometimes in the GIS space when working with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language
| basscomm wrote:
| > Is XSLT still a thing?
|
| On the frontend, not really. I built a small blog with XML
| and XSLT a few years ago and I was able to get things to
| mostly work, but XML and XSLT support in browsers is bad.
| It's been stuck at 1.0 with missing features for years and
| Chromium and FireFox both keep threatening to remove it. One
| day they will follow through with it.
| vallismortis wrote:
| I love XSL. There are some problems that it is absolutely
| stellar at solving. NCBI recently changed their JATS schema.
| No need to change any code, just modify the stylesheet and
| everything hums along as if nothing changed.
| basscomm wrote:
| Making an XSLT stylesheet for an RSS feed is pretty easy, but I
| found out the hard way that you have to put about 512
| characters of junk in your RSS file to do it. Otherwise
| browsers will just show unstyled XML no matter what else you
| do:
|
| See also: https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2009/06/how-to-use-
| xslt-to...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That was fifteen years ago, back when most browsers tried to
| do useful things with feeds. They've all _long_ since given
| up on that.
| basscomm wrote:
| The link is from 2009, but nothing has changed.
|
| I tried everything I could think of to style my RSS feed
| but nothing worked until I added a bunch of garbage at the
| top of the file to keep the browser from ignoring my
| instructions, and this was all the way back in 2020.
| rubinlinux wrote:
| How do i know if i want to sub to this if i cant see what type of
| things they post first?
| crtasm wrote:
| I can see by clicking the .xml link in my web browser.
| doodpants wrote:
| ...But I don't _want_ to read blogs in my feed reader. I always
| click the permalink to read the post at its original source. What
| 's the purpose of forcing me to endure my reader's inferior UX?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You could try reading this site in a different feed reader that
| does polish its UX?
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| Objection! The blog's rss page doesn't block common browser user
| agents, so it's still technically possible to view in a web
| browser. ;)
|
| More seriously, RSS readers do exist which use the browser's user
| agent, so I don't recommend blocking those.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I read the XML directly in my browser out of spite.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I had hoped it would include a harsh criticism of determinism,
| as well as of intellectual attempts at dictating human action
| and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man discusses in
| terms of the simple math problem: two times two makes four, but
| these XML nodes from the Underground seem to have a different
| author.
| esbranson wrote:
| As mentioned by chrismorgan, internetter, miduil, and others, CSS
| can be used to style XML without XSL transforms and is much more
| performant. The first time I saw this in the wild was the United
| States Legislative Markup (USLM) XML used by the US government,
| it can style large documents that their previous XML format with
| XSLT would choke on.[1] It's always interesting when government
| is more cutting edge than experimental stuff on the Web. It would
| be nice to get some standardized, basic CSS going for Atom feeds
| that anyone can link to and just works.
|
| [1] https://www.govinfo.gov/features/beta-uslm-xml
| CalRobert wrote:
| What a coincidence! I just was looking up a comic I used to read
| - Bizarro - and recalled that years ago I used an RSS reader to
| keep up with all sorts of comics, etc. and just fell out of the
| habit. And then I found that Bizarro has no RSS feed.
|
| Thanks for doing one small thing to keep a great tool alive.
| collsni wrote:
| https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml
| Fileformat wrote:
| I made feed.style[1] to help people add a decent XSLT stylesheet
| to their feed.
|
| I'm using it myself[2] and really like the effect.
|
| I think it always makes sense to have a stylesheet (and use
| text/xml content type): otherwise people clicking a rss/atom link
| are greeted with a wall of xml (or a download prompt). Hard to
| think of a worse UI for people who aren't familiar with feeds &
| feed readers.
|
| [1] https://www.feed.style/
|
| [2] https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml
| Fileformat wrote:
| feed.style also has a 'try it' feature: Here is what the OP's
| feed looks like with the stylesheet:
|
| https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthe...
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