Scripting News: Monday, January 27, 2025
This is a post for longtime Scripting News readers. As you know, I've been doing feed readers for a long time. They've been mostly organized around the river of news concept, which also happens to be the way twitter-like systems work. My rivers are built around RSS and formats that interop with RSS. #
Then I got one of the ideas out of the blue that at first didn't make sense, but then the more I thought about the better the idea seemed. It came from Mark Cuban, who liked one of my posts on Bluesky, it was about some FeedLand rivers I had produced, and then I did what I often do -- I offered to do something like that for him. For obvious reasons I don't need to go into here, you all are smart or you wouldn't be reading this. :-)#Anyway -- he said "I'd use that if it were on Bluesky." #
My first thought, ridiculous -- can't be done. They have all these limits that aren't present in HTML. I don't have any idea how I could make this work. Here's a screen shot of what a river looks like in FeedLand. #
But then after a few hours or days, the idea developed, as often happens, and I decided it might work and was worth a try. #
So I wrote a piece of software that hooked into FeedLand's outbound news flow, and picked out stories from the right feeds, and shot them over to an account on Bluesky. Thanks to Cuban, who linked to it from his million+ follower account, it has 7.6K followers. It uses the list of feeds in my blogroll on Scripting News to feed the river. I think it's a really good pioneering effort, with quite a few followers who are active. And it's going to stay running for the indefinite future. That was in December. #
Now I've gone a step further, and generalized the code so I can have N of these rivers instead of just one. And to prove it works, I now have two new rivers on Bluesky. #
dave.feediverse.org -- the Dave tab on my news site. It subscribes to all the RSS feeds I generate. My linkblog, Scripting News, even my YouTube channel which has an RSS feed. Chuck Shotton requested this. It was a good idea so it was the first new river I did on Bluesky. Went on the air just yesterday and now has 10 followers. #
nba.feediverse.org -- then my project for this morning is to do the same thing for the NBA. I'm a huge Knicks fan, and basically love all of the NBA. People say the Knicks must win a championship, but I say who cares. If they keep playing at this level, with new castmembers all the time, with the track record of current management, I'm a totally happy campter. If we won a championship all the more exciting, but after all those years in the wilderness, it's so nice to finally after all this time to have a great NBA team in NY (and sorry the Nets don't count). Anyway, there's nothing more really to say. If you like basketball, and use Bluesky -- here's what you follow. #
One more thing -- no federation here folks. It's very simple. No new formats or protocols, built entirely on the tried-and-true RSS and OPML formats for feeds and subscription lists. (And of course support for Atom and RDF too.)#
I'm glad Mark Cuban asked me to try this path, it provides something I hadn't thought of. Not just inbound feeds for Bluesky, inbound rivers. All we need now is Markdown support, and then a few more things, and we'll be back to where we were in 1997. :-)#
In a sanctuary city the local government accepts the fact that there are people living in the city who are not there legally. #
They want these people to be able to call the police without fear of being turned into the feds. Otherwise crime would go unreported and that would create much larger problems. #
They want the children of these people, who are often American citizens, to be able to go to school, again without having the parents reported to the feds. If they didn't guarantee that, the kids wouldn't be in school, and we all lose by having uneducated adults. It's a core principle of this country that educated citizens are a good thing.#
They want them to be able to get health care, to go to a hospital when someone is seriously ill or injured. This is partly for pragmatic reasons, to slow disease spreading, and also because we are a rich country and keeping people healthy is a good thing, just like education. What other purpose could a government have? (A fair question for Republicans, one they probably wouldn't want to answer truthfully.) #
The Republican talking points make it sound like local governments that declare as sanctuary cities are weak or immoral or anti-American, but that is not what's going on. You couldn't run a city with huge crimes commited against illegals because they would be so vulnerable, and kids need education, and everyone needs health care. Yet I hear the word used all the time in public discourse, and am concerned that most people don't know what it means. #
Linkblog items for the day.
Trump Administration Halts HIV Drugs in Poor Countries. politicalwire.com
Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time. rollingstone.com
Birthright Citizenship Is a Sacred Guarantee. theatlantic.com
Democrats gain nothing by compromising with Trump. editorialboard.com
Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness. techdirt.com
Why Trump won't be deporting "millions" of "criminal aliens." axios.com
Meta AI can now use your Facebook and Instagram data to personalize its responses. techcrunch.com
'Severance' Features Upstate New York Restaurant Phoenicia Diner. eater.com
First outbreak of rare bird flu strain reported at California poultry farm. theguardian.com
"The level of anticipatory obedience we're seeing from business, universities and the media is unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime." politicalwire.com
Nvidia, chip stocks plummet amid market sell-off as DeepSeek prompts questions over AI spending. yahoo.com
Mel Gibson and Republicans call Trump a 'Daddy.' Here's why. theframelab.org
Immigrants — many of them undocumented — make up most of the farm labor force substack.com
How to get good looking light from LED bulbs. theatlantic.com
About 150 NY & NJ locals were charged in the Capitol riots. Here's where some are now. gothamist.com
Bill Gates: Trump, Musk and how my neurodiversity made me. thetimes.com
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