For those who’re just joining us, I’ve dusted off a two-decade-old project idea and have actually started working on it. There’s a working prototype which I’m not going to link in this post, because this text will likely be around long after it’s been and gone, either shelved for another 20 years or thrown online in some kind of working form.
This is the closest Feedtube has ever come to being what I imagined in 2005, but … it’s also nowhere near the vision, and probably won’t ever be. Mainly because I don’t really recall what the real endgame plan was, or if anyone would have wanted it anyway.
“So, what is it right now Mike?” I hear myself asking as a way to segue into something resembling a point. Well, currently it is a working but not-very-navigable RSS feed reader. This is the minimum I needed to start hanging some other experiments off of, and also allows me to start running something in the background on a spare server to collect feed content and posts. Having a pool of content from various sources, a broad sample of all the sorts of problems out there, is going to be helpful. Fortunately I have a small cluster of servers, and a lot of hard drives!
The current plan
It’s close to the minimum basic functionality for a pure reader, which is nice. I’m currently trying to make my handling of pagination elegant in some way, so I can re-use the functionality on a variety of views, but this runs the risk of turning into another Hubris situation and if I can’t knock up something I like soon, I’ll make myself move on. Probably.
Once that’s done, and it’s possible to do some basic navigation around the place – find a feed, view the posts, look at a post and move forward and backwards – I’m going to take a big swing and try to turn it into something useful with ActivityPub.
I’m not going to get into the weeds of telling you what that is or why it’s good, just that the last time I used feedtube.com for anything at all, it was running RSS to ActivityPub and if we can get back to that level of usefulness I’ll be pretty happy.
Of course, once something like that gets put into service, there’s the risk of people using it, and you end up sort of committed to it. Which is not great if you’re not sure where you want to go with it. Also you start getting asked questions like …
Where’s the source code?
Right now, everything is in a private git repository and nobody but me has access. There are a few reasons for this, not least of which is that I don’t want to have to figure out what license to apply to it right now. There’s also the fact that I don’t exactly know what I’m building, and also that this is still very much a personal project where the only goal I really have is to get my brain back into the whole coding thing. It’s been a while!
I also don’t want to get into a position where anyone else is looking at this and wanting to help and contribute. This being largely a way to dust off some brain cobwebs means I want to solve problems and figure things out myself, and also if I don’t have a clear vision of what I want this to be to communicate, I may find myself getting pulled (lil git joke for you there) in directions I don’t actually want to go.
So, here’s my promise, to you my dearest reader. You’ll get the code, eventually. In some situation or another. First, I need to know if this current version actually is the thing I’m deploying or not – I’ve already totally abandoned one loose prototype, because it existed mainly for me to figure out how I wanted to structure the thing and what tools to use. The one in the screenshot above is technically version 2, if I cared about versioning at this point.
There are two vague paths, and two vague plans for this.
- I abandon this as an idea that went nowhere. In this case I’ll dump all the code under an MIT license or similar and throw it out there for anyone who wants to pick it up.
- I launch Feedtube as a public service in some form, in which case the source will be under some AGPL-like license and I’ll also add some form of contributor code of conduct guidelines.
Right now though, I just finished my coffee and it’s time to look at that pagination code again.