actually simple syndication

created  2022/09/12
category info, internet
views    1

this is a mirror of the spec located at `tilde.town/~dzwdz/ass`. zvava.org's build script generates an ass feed for both gemtext and html versions of the site separately

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📃 zvava.org/feed.ass

tilde.town/~dzwdz/ass

an alternative to "Really Simple" Syndication which tries to stay true to its name

the spec

An .ass file consists of a bunch of lines. Every line represents an item (e.g. article).

Every line consists of:

1. an ISO-8601 formatted date with dashes

2. the URI of the item

3. (optionally) the title of the item

Those elements are separated by tabs. Every tab after the URI is treated as part of the title. The order of the lines doesn't matter. Additional whitespace before the date is NOT permitted.

Lines can also be empty or start with the # character. Those lines are to be ignored by clients. I recommend adding a comment with a link to this page at the top, so people won't get confused about what to do with the file.

It's very highly recommended to name the file "feed.ass". This will make feed discovery much easier. If you want to get added to the list of known feeds, you MUST name your feed that (the 2 feeds in there are grandfathered in).

benefits over RSS

doesn't use XML - it's *actually* simple

articles can be easily compared/deduplicated

can be parsed with standard unix tools

examples

feed.ass

# Actually Simple Syndication - https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/ass/
2021-12-30	https://example.com/article-1	Article 1: Something something
2021-04-20	gemini://example.com/brpf

one-liner feed aggregator

#!/bin/sh
curl -L $(cat feeds.txt) | grep -v ^# | sort

software, websites, etc

feeds.txt - all currently known feeds

a planet-like feed aggregator

the full git repo

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