so - my 10 cents… I’ve built a number of the news apps using RSS feeds. A number of the apps I WANTED to build - easily exceed the timeout for apps on the Tidbyt servers - so it’s a tricky thing. I’ve bypassed the issue with a combination of Github & CI/CD scripts to pre-pull the data and then have the app get it from gihub (see my Mayo Clinic News app - it doesn’t pull from their feed directly). If you allow just any URL - you might get a blank screen and you’ve got no insight into why without doing debugging yourself & pulling the code. I’m certainly happy to look at some of these URLs. I can take my normal News app, modify it for a list of URLs (the above is a starting point) and then take requests to add more & review as necessary / reject those that don’t / can’t make the cut. What should we call the app? “Misc RSS Feeds?”
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Thanks for chiming in. I definitely don’t have the same insights as you. I understand some of what you’re saying and also noticed that not all feeds are the same (e.g. polygon/verge is pretty clean while slickdeals has plenty of “![CDATA[”. meanwhile dpreview being full of encoded text!).
I’m not sure I understand fully, but are you suggesting a single app that has a drop down of vetted feeds rather than letting people paste the feed URL?
Also, for the record I only have experience using the tidbyt prior to gifting it to someone. I did back a gen 2 model though. I just submitted this feature hoping to solve other requests that can be addressed by using RSS site feeds as a source of fresh content for the tidbyt to cycle through.
yes. So look at my Mens or Womens Soccer as an example. You get a drop down of leagues. In that app I have a file in the “cloud” that lists the leagues you can monitor. I would do this the same way & give a drop down of options (that also allows us to update the list outside of needing a Tidbyt community app merge & makes new feeds faster to adopt). For this I’d only want to do the headlines (instead of headlines + text like I do in “The Guardian” or “Financial Times” - it would be more like Wall Street Journal/CNN/CBC.ca/FoxNews). Don’t worry about the CDATA stuff - that’s all fixable - I’ve got stuff that parses it and handles a bunch of it. I need to fix my AA app to handle some things better as well.
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I’ve got a ping in my calendar to look at it this weekend. the good news is 90% of the code is already written. It’s just a matter of the feeds & testing performance. Then deciding what to call it and getting Mats to merge it for us.
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That’s great! I basically never use a computer without a feedly tab open. It’s one of my most used mobile apps too.
I appreciate your efforts.
It’s great! Thank you. I guess if I think of more I’ll just reply here ?? I guess when it’s live and people know who published they can also request
re: Additions - reply Here (this topic will eventually auto-close itself) & mention my ID - or over on the tidbyt discord channel. I typically check in once or twice a week both places (in between meetings). Worst case - do an issue on Tidbyt github & mention my github ID @jvivona - I’ll get an email about that.
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give it 15 minutes. make sure to close your app on your mobile device & relaunch it.
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I was able to play with it over the weekend. It’s great.
If any suggestions, I’d say allow more than 3 posts to be pulled? Maybe 10?
Thank you so much for making this.
well - you are going to run out of height on the marquee. A vertical marquee is restricted to 320px high, which for titles only, allows for 40ish lines of text… each headline is somewhere between 6 and 10 lines high - so that’s why I picked 3. I’m happy to mod & change it to 10 - but you are going to get a TON of text cut off and only get a few articles and I don’t want you wondering why… lots of extra processing cycles in the loop for really no gain in function. it’ll look like this on the screen.
Oops. Fine as is then. I wasn’t aware of the vertical limitation. Thanks!
I’m going to push an update to allow up to 5 - you can decide on each feed if it’s worth it or not (e.g. you are consistently getting more than 3) - I’m sure there are some instances where the titles are short and it may be worthwhile. But some (I’m gonna pick on slickdeals for a sec) - I think their folks get paid by the posted word for titles…
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