Newsboat RSS Reader - Not Just For News Feeds

do you use an RSS news feed reader I use news boat news boat is a terminal based RSS reader I've been using news boat for a few months now I'm not that avid of an news feed reader I don't use RSS feeds that much but today I was playing around a little bit in news boat and I was and the idea struck me what could I view in an RSS reader other than just your standard news site beats you know your typical blog sites and news article sites what else can you do with RSS feeds and have that output in your RSS reader of choice in my case news boat so today that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna play around a little bit and show you what you can do with your RSS news feed reader so I use a terminal-based RSS reader called news boat let me go to my desktop here and I'm gonna launch news boat here got it hot keyed so this again it's terminal base let me zoom in so you can see what's going on but it's your standard news feed reader I have a list of RSS feed so that I've added the news boat and it displays them so if I navigate I don't know to linux journal news here and you know it's got the last 20 25 articles from linux journal like it clicked one read the little preview if i wanted to read the whole thing you know i could go to a proper web browser maybe a terminal-based web browser like links since i'm already in the terminal to read the full article or a graphical web browser like Firefox or Chrome would work just fine cue to back out so let me get back to the beginning here how do you populate news boat well you do that with a plain text file where you just add RSS news feeds basically URLs let me open a terminal and again I'm gonna zoom in so if you use news boat there should be a directory on your system called dot news boat if there's not create that directory and in the dot news boat directory there should be a file called URLs if it doesn't exist create that file URL and then in that file I launched that file the URL file in your favorite text editor I'm gonna edit it here in vim but you could use any plain text editor is fine they quit back out of that I did not launch the correct file film URLs I typed a dim URL without an s alright so this is my URLs fault it's got all my feeds and I could keep adding as many feeds as I want but you know today I got to thinking does it really just have to be news sites I mean that's how most people think of our RSS feeds as news feeds but what else could we add to this list one of the really neat things you can add to any RSS feed reader is sub British your favorite sub reddits overrun Reddit all of them have RSS news feeds it's not obvious that they have an RSS feed because there's no RSS icon anywhere nothing on the page indicates that you have a RSS feed to subscribe to but you do all you need to do is at the top of the page you'll have the name of the Reddit you know our slash Linux all you need to do is change our slash Linux to our slash Linux dot RSS and the URL if you hit enter you can see you know you get a little pop up here in Firefox that this is the atom syndication feed it's a news feed so now that you have the proper URL copy it and then put it over in the URLs txt file that plain text file that we discussed earlier so I closed it out so let me CD back in the news boat directory them URLs zoom in here and then right that relaunch news boat and there you go the very last feat is our / Linux Linux good news / Linux free so that's the description from that particular subreddit are / Linux we could actually change this matter of fact I probably would change that because that's not very obvious what that news feed is because it's gonna be completely different than all these news Oracle feeds so what I would do is here in vim the inner insert mode and what you need to do to add your own custom title to a feed here in news boat is you need to do a quotations then the tilde character and then write the title that you want to go with I'm gonna go with read it : and then R / Linux and then of course that ending quotation marks and I write that here in vim and now let me relaunch news boat and now as you can see the title has been changed now it's pretty obvious what this is r / linux if i hit enter you know here are all the the latest posts on r / linux i could read you know a little preview of it here so that's one thing you could do read it news feeds what else can you add the next thing that i think most people would find really neat to add to their RSS news feed reader is YouTube channels every YouTube channel has an RSS feed YouTube does not make this information widely known its although it's public information you're not gonna find any link anywhere on anybody's YouTube channel to an RSS feed there's no RSS icon anywhere on the page no links and subscribe to a news feed or anything like that you just have to know that a channel has a news feed and the proper way to add a YouTube channel news feed is let me go back to the film document where I was adding URLs and if i zoom in in this last line I just added www.youtube.com/drzakirchannel score ID equal and then you need the channel ID what is the channel ID well that is this really strange group of characters right there if you go to most YouTube channels instead of a proper name like distro tube a lot of times the URL will have this string of characters usually beginning with a capital u and I have that so if i I don't know copied in that particular channel ID there and then just pasted this into the document here so I've added my channel ID now again I don't want just a random you know link or URL from YouTube as the title of the feed so again I'm gonna quote a shin marks tilde character this time I'll type YouTube in all caps : so it's obvious it's a YouTube channel and not your standard news article site and then the name of the channel which is my channel distro - in quotations let me write this file and relaunch news boat and zoom in back to news boat and you can see the very last thing is youtube distro - so we have now added a reddit subreddit we added a YouTube channel what else could we yeah well you can add anything write anything that has an RSS feed so I've kind of played around with us today and I've discovered a few different things that I could add to my news boat so let me show you my configured news boat that I spent an hour or so on this morning so this is the news boat config that I did earlier today so what I did is the first thing is I have these comment lines now in my URLs file here and if I open news boat it will be obvious what those comments do you see the comments here and there basically it's like news boat tries to treat this as a RSS feed but of course it's not a RSS feed so if you see 0 of 0 there's no news feeds to read there it's really a dead URL right it's just dashes hyphens but anyway it's a really neat because visually it breaks up you know the groups of RSS feeds that I've added here in this file I'm a closed news boat so the first section here of course is I just titled it news feeds and every single news feed here I prefaced and then the title with all caps news feed again so it's obvious that these are news feeds and that these are your standard like news article sites so the YouTube channels here I mean close that so this is just some YouTube channels some linux related YouTube channels that I went ahead and grabbed the channel ID for and I just added just to see how they work in news boat and they work fantastic I added you know wait a few Shubert broadcasting Bronwyn Duke looks smoother than a variety others line of stick tips is on here level one text and then I yeah I picked about ten or twelve of the 100 or so Linux channels that I'm subscribed to just to test this out and then the same thing with reddit I added ten or twelve subreddits here in news boat again just to try out the next thing that I found that you could add were get lab and github repositories so I have a git lab page right and I can get the RSS feed from that by simply adding dot Adam to the end of the URL kind of like we added dot RSS to the end of the reddit URLs find your favorite get lab page and then just add dot Adam at the end and you'd have the feed and that allowed me to add my get lab feed here here in news boat and it works on github as well as get lab because I went to loop Smith's get a page and dot Adam over on github does the same thing SourceForge you can find RSS feeds on SourceForge those are actually on the page there's an RSS icon you just click on the icon and you can add SourceForge RSS feeds Mastodon has RSS feeds for every user I will tell you though the RSS feed it's not that user-friendly or it's not that useful I'll show you in just a second and Arch Linux I just happen to notice that the Arch Linux website had a number of RSS feeds that you could subscribe to such as packages removed from the repos packages added from the repos packages added to the aur as well as changes in the arch wiki so let me show you news boat so this is what I've got here right so this is news boat there's the news feeds there's the YouTube feeds there's the reddit feeds the git repos my repo Luke Smith's repos source for mastodons I'll let me show you why Mastodon it's not that useful because if I hit enter here every single entry here is titled the same thing new status by distro tube it really doesn't give you a preview of what I posted or commented so I probably wouldn't bother with Mastodon but it was just neat that Mastodon does have feeds for every user oh I haven't tried the arch ones I just added these to the to the URLs file so arch package added let's see what that is so these are the latest packages added to the arch repo so pretty neat and if I wanted to see about the latest Linux LTS that was edit I could hit enter and it doesn't really give me any any information but it does give me a web address and again I could open that in a proper web browser if I wanted to read the full article the arch wiki so the latest changes to the arch wiki so somebody edited the page called list of games and I could I guess see what changes they made pretty cool anyway hope you guys find this a little useful I think it's kind of neat some of what you can do with RSS news feeds feed readers as something I had never really considered doing most of this stuff before I thought it was just for reading news but the fact that I can get YouTube RSS feeds is really neat reddit RSS feeds I will definitely use the YouTube and reddit feeds I'll probably use some of the git repo uh beats too because I you know do follow some people on get lab and github and that's a neat way of getting you know new changes to certain repos is just having those RSS feeds in your favorite RSS feed reader probably won't use the mastodons when the arch one would be useful if you were an arch user and particularly if you were a contributor to the arch linux distro then you would find those very useful before I go this show was made possible by handsome Carlos Chris Douglas Dylan Leo Rob Robert and Tony they are my highest tier patrons over on patreon they are the producers of the show also brought to you by all those fine ladies and gentlemen they are the supporters of this channel without them none of this would be possible you'd like to support my work please consider doing so you'll find me at distro tube over patreon okay guys peace [Music]

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 16,742

Rating: 4.9502072 out of 5

Keywords: Newsboat, terminal, RSS, Linux, newsfeed, reader, atom, feeds, Youtube, Reddit, GitLab, GitHub, Mastodon

Id: CJXdQTGm1jg

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 24 2019