planetperl VS twitter-json2atom

planetperl has the code that drives Planet Perl (ok, actually, it contains the configuration for that site – most of the actual work is done by Perlanet – and see below for more about that)

title: Planet Perl description: There's More Than One Way To Aggregate It url: https://perl.theplanetarium.org/ author: name: Dave Cross email: [email protected] twitter: davorg entries: 75 entries_per_feed: 5 opml_file: docs/opml.xml page: file: docs/index.html template: index.tt feed: file: docs/atom.xml format: Atom google_ga: G-HD966GMRYP cutoff_duration: months: 1 feeds: - feed: https://www.perl.com/article/index.xml title: perl.com web: https://perl.com/ - feed: https://news.perlfoundation.org/atom.xml title: Perl Foundation News web: https://news.perlfoundation.org/

Previously, my workflows for these sites just needed a single job (called build) but now I added a deploy job which depended on build. For example, the workflow that builds Planet Perl now looks like this:

A little bit more hacking on Planet Perl. You can now filter the sources that you want to see (and those choices are remembered for the next time you visit the site). Thanks to Gabor for suggesting it.

If you'd like to suggest new feeds to add, then raise an issue or submit a pull request on the GitHub repo.

Then, at some point, that changed. It wasn’t that web feeds vanished overnight. They still exist for many sites. But they are no longer ubiquitous. You can’t guarantee they’ll exist for every site you’re interested in. I remember people saying that social media would replace them. I was never convinced by that argument but, interestingly, one of the first times I noticed them vanishing was when Twitter removed their web feed of a user’s posts. They wanted people to use their AP instead (so I wrote twitter-json2atom that turned their API’s JSON into an Atom feed – I suspect it no longer works). Honestly, I think the main reason for the fall in popularity of web feeds was that people wanted you to read their content on their web sites where the interesting content was surrounded by uninteresting adverts.