Friday December 10, 2021; 6:30 PM EST
- Soon after the Old School blogging tool was developed for Drummer, I decided to create a news river of all of the people who were creating blogs using Old School. I did create a post in October 2021 with a little more information on the tools used, but I wanted to take some time today to describe a little more about how the app works, how I am using it, and how others can use it.#
- The app linked in the previous paragraph is a single web page that is displaying a "river of news" created by the River5 RSS feed aggregator. River5 is running on a Linux server and once a minute it checks the list of Old School blog RSS feeds that I have compiled. If someone in that list posted to their blog and updated their RSS feed, River5 detects that and updates the river file, which is a collection of all posts by the blogs in the list (I think there is a limit of 300 items, so it can be pretty long). Every five minutes, that river file is transferred via FTP using a cron job over to another server which hosts the main app page and the river file. So, within five minutes, a post should appear at the top of the news river app.#
- The format of how posts are displayed depends on how the user created the post in Drummer. If a user clicks on the plus sign to start a post, and does not have any sub-headings (all the text is in one headline), then that headline will be displayed (up to 500 characters). If a user uses that headline to create a title, and then creates sub-headlines under that headline, then the app will show the title headline with a triangle to the left. To read the post, click on the triangle to open the post (similar to if you had an outline collapsed in Drummer and then opened it). Another "feature" is that the text in the news river comes from the RSS feed. If you edit a post multiple times, sometimes that text does not get updated in the feed, or the post time remains the same, so new material might not show up in the river, because River5 did not detect any change. Finally, for every post or group of posts from a site, there is a link to the site and to the RSS feed of the site. For more information on the display of items, see the riverBrowser toolkit page.#
- So why have an app like this? I think there are several reasons. First, it makes it easier to follow what Old School bloggers are posting. Otherwise, you would have to go to all of the sites to see what the latest content is. Duh! This is the primary use case for RSS readers - keeping up with multiple web sites, seeing the most recent material at the top of the list, and older material further down the list. When most people use RSS readers, they are reading privately, whereas the Old School Drummers News River is a public resource.#
- A second reason is that this type of app can help foster a community. There are 36 feeds currently flowing into the news river. Some people are active, some are not. It is a way to gauge activity within the blogging community. By reading the other Old School bloggers, you are learning about them - their interests, likes/dislikes, and so on.#
- A third reason for this app is that it can function as a social network. If an Old School blogger wanted to let the other Old School bloggers know about something, they can post to their blog, and it will show up in the river within minutes. Of the 36 bloggers, I am guessing at least half of them are watching posts on the river, to stay up on what is happening. In this manner, the app is like a Twitter list, showing you content of people you are interested in, which might spur you to post something as well, or interact in some way.#
- I hope this is helpful to other Old School bloggers who are watching the site. As always, you can reach out to me on Twitter at @AndySylvester99 if you have questions.#