I currently have four news products powered by the A8c instance of FeedLand, with plans for more in the works:
Here is how I set them up:
Gathering Sources and making the OPML files
I started with the WP Special Projects site list. We have our own CLI with a command to export a site list, which I used. Then, since they are all WordPress sites, I appended /feed/ to the end each one.
Since two of these products contain hundreds of URLs, so I made a utility script in PHP to take CSVs and turn them into OPML files: https://gist.github.com/cagrimmett/5260af01f5f9642ff7677d52e88fdff4
For the Peekskill list the main hurdle was identifying the feeds. The City of Peekskill miraculously overhauled their main website a couple days later and exposed a bunch of new feeds, which I promptly added. I discovered the new site while paying my water bill online.
On Newspack, I needed to scrape the list of sites from an open bookmarking service where they keep their main list. Once scraped, I appended /feed/ and put the list into my csv-to-opml script.
For the WordPress Project News I grabbed the feeds pretty quickly from WordPress.org and make.WordPress.org.
Suggested improvement: Auto feed discovery, so users only need to add a domain they want to follow, not the full feed URL. Would be needed for the bookmarklet Dave suggested.
Importing & Categories
I added categories for each news product, then imported the OPML files. I added the categories as tabs in my main news feed to verify the imports worked and content made it into the rivers.
Suggested improvement: If categories are in an OPML file getting imported but do not exist in the user’s account, add them.
Outline-based templates
Dave implementing outline-based templates was a breakthrough and made spinning up news products a little easier for me. Here are the docs.
I implemented the four of these using Instant Outlines in Drummer.
Here are my four outlines:
- https://drummer.land/chuck@grimmett.co/MakeWordPress.opml
- https://drummer.land/chuck@grimmett.co/T51Partners.opml
- https://drummer.land/chuck@grimmett.co/Peekskill.opml
- https://drummer.land/chuck@grimmett.co/newspack.opml
I used Drummer for two reasons:
- It is the easiest way to make OPML files!
- Instant Outlines made iteration fast and simple. I make an edit, it autosaves, and I refresh the news product to see the change.
Long-term, once I stop making changes to the templates, I’ll probably download the stable OPML files from Drummer and stick them on one of my webservers.
Styling
Once I got a basic template up and running, I decided to try my hand at styling each one. Dave added support for loading custom CSS, so all that I needed to do was inspect the page to find the right selectors, write some styles to make my vision a reality, and add that to the OPML. Easy peasy.
Suggested improvement: While this works for developers and power uses, we’ll eventually need to support an easier way for customization. I suggested the WordPress Customizer to Dave as one idea we can borrow.
Mapping Domains
For Peekskill News and WordPress Project News, I mapped domains using PagePark. More on that here:
Dave helped me with filter.js, the key to serving a news product to requests from the domain. More in this issue: https://github.com/scripting/a8c-FeedLand-Support/issues/18
Suggested improvement: Should we support mapping domains in the application? See https://github.com/scripting/a8c-FeedLand-Support/issues/19
Areas for further exploration:
- I don’t have tabs on any of my news products.
- I could split out the Peekskill one into Official City Updates and Local Journalism.
- I could add more blogs to the WordPress one and split out the Make WordPress Team Updates and Release News and General News
- The design of these pretty much look the same. How can I go wild and reimagine these templates? This is a time for experimentation. That’s what these are for.
- Add domains for the two without domains.
- Make more news products!
- A8c Blogging Club feeds
- More topical interests.
- Christie Wright’s Customer-Centric Operations feeds
- Apple bloggers (this is a product people might be interested in, even though I’m no longer that interested in the space)
- My favorite food blogs