It does improve the scriptability of Ek. I can now follow feeds while creating the channel like this:
ek follow `ek channels Blogs` https://example.com/blog/
The channels call will return the uid of the created channel or the uid of the existing channels when it already exists.
I created a new release of Ek(ster) which checks status codes in the HTTP responses of the microsub server. See version 0.8.3 on Github.
And as always please use the -verbose option to show the actual requests and responses. An example:
ek -verbose channels
This way you get the actual headers and body of the requests, which could help with debugging.
Import OPML files into Microsub servers
Some time ago I wrote a one liner to import OPML files. Now it has become a lot easier to import an OPML file with ek.
ek import opml subscriptions.opml
It is also possible to export an OPML file.
ek export opml > subscriptions.opml
With these two commands it becomes easier to import and export OPML files.
The format of the OPML files should match the structure of the Microsub channels and feeds. Microsub has a list of channels and each channel contains a list of feeds. If the OPML file contains feeds on the first level of the file, it will skip these. Channels in the second (or higher) level will also be skipped.
Implementing Microsub yourself (part 1)
In this article I will try to show how you can implement a very simple version of Microsub yourself.
Let's start
The protocol for Microsub consists of a number of actions. The actions can be provided with a parameter action to the microsub endpoint. When implementing a Microsub server it's possible to create a version of responses where you don't need to implement the full thing. It depends on what you want to use. At the moment we will only implement channels and timeline.
Simplified channels
For example the channels action provides 4 different functions in the full implementation.
- Get a list of the available channels
- Create a new channel with a name
- Update the name of a channel
- Delete a channel
A great way to start is to only return a fixed number of channels. That way you only implement function 1 and only return a successful response for functions 2, 3 and 4. Clients will work when you do this and it becomes a lot easier to implement.
As an example in PHP:
if ($_GET['action'] == 'channels') {
$channels = [
[ 'name' => 'Notifications', 'uid' => 'notifications' ],
[ 'name' => 'Home', 'uid' => 'home' ],
];
header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode(['channels'=>$channels]);
}
Simplified timeline
The timeline action provides 1 function. There are 2 parameters that allow paging. For a simplified version this does not need to be implemented.
The timeline action should return a response that looks like this:
{
"items": [
{ ... },
{ ... }
],
"paging": {}
}
By leaving paging empty you signal to the client, that there are no pages available at the moment.
The items array should be filled with JF2 items. JF2 is a simplified version of Microformats 2 that allows for easier implementation by clients and servers. An example could look like this:
{
"type": "entry",
"name": "Ekster now supports actual Indieauth to the Microsub channels. It's now possible for example to connect with http://indiepaper.io and archive pages to a channel. But of course the possibilities are endless.",
"content": {
"text": "Ekster now supports actual Indieauth to the Microsub channels. It's now possible for example to connect with http://indiepaper.io and archive pages to a channel. But of course the possibilities are endless.",
"html": "Ekster now supports actual Indieauth to the Microsub channels. It's now possible for example to connect with indiepapier.io and archive pages to a channel. But of course the possibilities are endless."
},
"published": "2018-07-15T12:54:00+02:00",
"url": "https://p83.nl/p/795"
}
If you return a list of the items from your microsub endpoint, you could see them in the client. Now the harder part is, gathering these items from feeds and websites and converting these to JF2.
Simplified Microsub endpoint
And create a file with the following code called endpoint.php in the web root of your website.
The code can be found here: endpoint.php
Add the following information to your <head> tag:
<link rel="microsub" href="https://yourdomain.com/endpoint.php" />
That's all there is to it. Now you can Login with Monocle.
Add set and hash of feeds to Redis to improve subscriptions
I just made a change to Ekster that allows it to receive Micropub requests from Indiepaper. In a way this already worked, but only with source_id and JF2 request bodies. This change allows the auth token to be in the Authorization header and JSON micropub requests.
It always starts with showing the oldest unread post. I would like to have a way to show the older posts. This could be done with "before" in timelines, but it doesn't seem to be implemented in Monocle for example.
I just implemented part of the Feedbin API in my Microsub server. It seems that in the future it will be quite easy to add all kinds of backends and maybe even set them per channel or similar.
Microsub changes
Yesterday I made an improvement to support paging with ZADD and ZRANGEBYSCORE. This allows me to get range of entries based in the timestamp of the published date (converted to Unix timestamp). The problem is that the unread entries are still available in the list. It's hard to find the first unread entry in the list. That entry is the starting point of the list of entries for the first page of items.
I implemented the solution like this: keep two lists. One with all unread items and one with the read items. In principle an entry moves from one list to the other in a linear fashion, because that's the reading order. So now when there is no after or before argument the server can send the first twenty items of the list. The first and last item contain the next before and after values. Nice thing is that I now get unread count for free with ZCARD.
Some observations:
- search is pretty strange to implement, it now only supports full urls.
- it does support automatic fetching of feeds
- it doesn't have caching support of items. It always fetches the full page
- no support for smart or automatic feed downloading, no WebSub. It should in the future
- mute and block are not implemented
