HTML Journal and the Neon Kiosk (Easy RSS feeds for site news)

[m15o]

Hello hello dear forum friends!

Recently, I've been developing a little format to write journals in HTML. Here is what the format looks like:

Code

<h1>My journal</h1>

<article>
 <h2>2022-06-21</h2>
 <p>Welcome to my journal!</p>
</article>

If your page has the above elements, it will be recognized as an HTML Journal. HTML Journals can be automatically converted to a web feed (Atom), so anyone subscribe to it and be notified when you update it.

And so where can you read all the journals, you ask? It's on the Neon Kiosk: an HTML Journal aggregator. If you publish an HTML Journal, you can send it over to the Neon Kiosk and updates will appear there.

I hope this helps lower the barriers to publish a feed for our updates. Hope you like it!

[Melooon]

Out of curiosity is this a clone of the RSS system on my site, because its exactly how mine works, and its (almost) exactly the article structure I use Or maybe we just think alike?

Either way, this is a really cool project! One request though.. I think my homepage would prob confuse it, can you add the option to make Neon look for content within a specified id as the article area?

For example: view-source:https://melonking.net/home.html (line 433) has all articles in <div id="newsblock"> so being able to ask Neon to only look in "newsblock" would remove almost all issues. (Also I'm know Id need to switch my <div class="article"> to <article> but thats an easy fix!) Also I assume it supports multiple <p>'s per article?? Oh and what happens if I have other things in there like images? It would be cool if it created a link like "IMAGE - Click here to view"

Oh rrrr this is such a cool idea why didn't I think of it!

EDIT: Also how did you solve the issue of generating consistent unique IDs for atom? I ended up manually numbering all of mine because there was no way to count them once old ones were removed from my homepage.

[m15o]

I always love your site(s) and ideas! I'm really inspired by them and what I see on sites of people from this forum too. I was writing my journal and maintaining a feed.atom file that I was updating manually. And while it's cool, I'd rather write the journal entry once than on 2 different places. :omg:k:

Either way, this is a really cool project!

Thank youu <3

I think my homepage would prob confuse it, can you add the option to make Neon look for content within a specified id as the article area?

That's a good point! You'd like to make sure other parts of the page that aren't journal entries won't be mistakenly treated as such? If so, I think your page would be fine: HTML Journal looks for every <article> with an <h1> that starts with an iso 8601 formatted date as its 10 first characters. If the article doesn't have such an h1, it's discarded. I've created a validator to help making sure the page follows the right format and is read correctly.

Also I assume it supports multiple <p>'s per article?? Oh and what happens if I have other things in there like images? It would be cool if it created a link like "IMAGE - Click here to view"

At the moment, it just shows everything that's in the <article>, including images, any HTML tags, also <script>, which I should probably forbid!

EDIT: Also how did you solve the issue of generating consistent unique IDs for atom? I ended up manually numbering all of mine because there was no way to count them once old ones were removed from my homepage.

Oh yes, that was definitely challenging. I've written this spec that describes how to go from an HTML Journal to an Atom feed. Here's the part on ID generation:

An entry's required "id" element is equal to the concatenation of the feed's "id", a # character, and the entry's title (e.g. feed_id#title). Any space character should be converted to "-".

[Melooon]

I updated my site to meet the spec, but the validator says that no artcile are found https://melonking.net/home.html

Also it would be nice if we could use custom date formats somehow, because while ISO is ok.. its not may favourite, I don't find it very human readable because humans don't need to know the year first, we already know what year it is!

[m15o]

Ohhh awesome! I think what's missing to validate is the month part of the date to be two characters, e.g. 2022-06-22 vs 2022-6-22. If you change that I can add it to the Kiosk.

Also it would be nice if we could use custom date formats somehow, because while ISO is ok.. its not may favourite, I don't find it very human readable because humans don't need to know the year first, we already know what year it is!

Dates can be so hard! It's a good point though.

[Melooon]

Aha that fixed it!

It sets the title as "Welcome Home Kiddo :^]" which I don't mind, thats a cool title for my site, although I should really be "Moo's News" because thats the name of the news section.. but thats another minor issue :omg:k:

[m15o]

Woohooo

It's now on the kiosk! You also get an automatic Atom feed from your updates right there: https://journal.miso.town/atom?url=https://melonking.net/home.html

Unrelated: I love the fact that you wrote a zine!

[Melooon]

Cool! Thank you Also zines are actually really fun to make, I wanna do more!

Ok so further feedback, its really cool that you can get a feed of all feeds at https://journal.miso.town/atom?url=https://kiosk.nightfall.city

HOWEVER, the visual presentation could be improved in a reader; for example, why is it showing me the date 3 times and what is the empty link it's generating? (I think I remember status cafe doing the empty links too). It would be nice if it would show journal titles instead of dates as titles.. although that would not work for per journal feeds.. so maybe the kiosk feed needs some extra tweaking and polish? I updated my old RSS feed to cut out dates so its a cleaner look, something like that might work here too.
Its a little bit computery, and could use more of a human touch

(Kiosk Atom feed on left, Melonland RSS feed on the right - both are generated from the same html page)

[m15o]

Thank you Melon, this is great feedback! That's definitely one of the shortcomings of the current Atom <> HTML Journal implementation. I'll need to review the part of the spec that talks about titles as well: at the moment, they aren't mandatory:

<article>
 <h1>2022-06-23</h1>
 <p>some text</p>
</article>

The above is a valid entry. I have a few ideas!

[m15o]

Just a tiny little update to let you know that the journal spec now looks for H2 within the article instead of H1: there are many benefits that should come out of this. Rational.

Also! The Atom support has improved and doesn't add the title within the content.

[shevek]

Hey, I was wondering if the layout structure needs to have the most recent entry on top every time like the example, or if the tool will read what the most recent entry is via the date as well?
Because one of my journals progresses from oldest to newest to better document the journey, so the newest entries would always be at the bottom, not the top. Would the HTML Journal/Atom still work for this?

[m15o]

Hey, I was wondering if the layout structure needs to have the most recent entry on top every time like the example, or if the tool will read what the most recent entry is via the date as well?
Because one of my journals progresses from oldest to newest to better document the journey, so the newest entries would always be at the bottom, not the top. Would the HTML Journal/Atom still work for this?

hi! You can put them in any order. The date will be used for ordering!

[shevek]

hi! You can put them in any order. The date will be used for ordering!

Thank you so much, I will try that soon then