Uh, What are RSS feeds? NEWSBOAT

all right yo yo what's up everyone in this video I know I said I was gonna do a video on news boat and it's a terminal RSS feed client and I am doing that in fact this is this is the video but I realize they're probably a bunch of my subscribers who do - they're a few years who didn't which isn't a bad thing might not necessarily know anything about RSS feeds or they might not know exactly what they're for you've probably seen you have probably seen something that looks like this this little logo here that's the RSS feed logo that appears on different sites that have RSS feeds but just to be clear on what it is so the idea I mean you know what a Facebook feed or a Twitter feed is where you get updates from different people and the idea of RSS feed which you know predated both but the idea is basically have a Facebook feed but without Facebook you know it's like a botnet free way of getting updates or the idea is you know there are a bunch of different websites there are a bunch of different people who have a bunch of updates at all given points of time and it's nice just to have one format for them they keep an RSS feed they make updates to it and you have an RSS feed reader which is looking at that URL and updates based on that that that's the idea behind it so it's a way of keeping updated without having to open your browser and go to the 22 sites you care about or you know have some kind of enormous social media account where everyone knows what you're looking at and stuff like that so anyway I have an RSS feed just to give you an idea how it looks you can go to my website and click on the RSS feed logo now depending on what browser you use it might just show up as a bunch of text it might show this is a Firefox derivative so it's gonna look like this but it actually doesn't matter what it looks like in a browser because they're not really supposed to be viewed in browsers you're really supposed to take the URL either from the URL bar just right click and copy URL and put it in an RSS feed reader and this is going to appear well actually I might as well go ahead and show you what it looks like in news book so news boat of course is a terminal client for viewing RSS feeds it's pretty lightweight very extensible let me go ahead and open it up so here I have a bunch of the feeds I'm subscribed to and I have a whole bunch more lower down here but so if I look at so again this is what this looks like in Firefox now if I open up my RSS feed which is here at the top you'll see that each of the entries are you know basically just different items here actually I'm gonna turn on scroll lock just so you know I I do have you know vim bindings on all this stuff so I can scroll up and down here and each one of these it's basically an XML file and it reads each entry as you know a blog post in a way so each of these are viewed as units so every time I update my RSS feed reader it's gonna go look for this file on my website it's gonna see if there's a new entry in downloaded alright so anyway what about news boat so again here's that here's the basics of news boat let me pull up the config for it so the config is don news boat slash config and I my the stuff I have here most of it is like them like bindings and different bindings that I I happen to like I do change the colors as well and I'll talk about this stuff in a little bit but just so you know if you want to know how to install news boat you really just install it how you learn any other program with one there's one additional thing you have to do for it to run and that is you have to have a news boat slash URLs file so if I open up this file this URLs file this is all the RS these are all the RSS feeds that it's looking at so if I scroll down here actually each line here is equivalent to each of these entries here in the correct order so you'll see that my RSS feed is here in the I have a whole bunch of other stuff down here so in order for news but to load you need to at least have one RSS feed you're welcome to copy copy mine or anyone elses but it doesn't matter also notice them some stuff here you can tag different RSS feeds so I tagged like TW for Twitter or Twitter accounts YT for YouTube accounts and when you're a news boat you can press T and it will show you a link of those tags so if you want to categorize things that's allowed as well it's pretty easy to do that and also if the account doesn't have a good name if the feed doesn't have a good name on it or you need to rename it for whatever reason or you just want to keep it different you can throw in something in quotes with a tilde at the beginning and that's going to be so this one for example I renamed with a tilde so that that's really all you need to know about the URL file after that it's really just to you know really get a lot of bang for your buck got a news boat it's really just adding in the URLs that you actually are the the RSS feeds that you're actually gonna use okay so let me talk about the more extensible part of of news boats so again as most terminal clients it's it's supposed to be you know it's supposed to be lightweight you're not supposed to be thinking about it that much I've made my nice and vim based but how so how do I go about actually like using the content here well first there that now there are some kind of RSS feeds that are just gonna be like blog posts so for example this one right here rajab cons I think his is based on basically like a blogspot or something like that and it automatically compiles into an RSS feed so if I open this up it more or less looks like it the blog post or something like that now there since it's a terminal client it doesn't put images in in line by default but what I actually have this you can set a URL viewer now I had a video a little bit ago on the program URL view and what that does is well I'll just show you I can run it with a heaven map to capital u here that takes you it gives you a list of all the diff url's and you can click on one you want to open I have a link handler that'll open things in different ways so this will open up you know whatever you know thing you tell it to or something like that with whatever program you want that yet more or less has to be set in your link handler or how are you however you do it also so the stuff down here you also have the ability to open up links like the link up here each RSS feed is gonna have some kind of link you have the choice of opening then an external program now by default news boot is a little weird because you can't just say I want you know I want these five different programs and I want you know different shortcuts to open them with these programs or something like that so what I what you actually end up doing and this is actually in the arch wiki I mean it's basically the official way of doing it is you can open things with your browser which I set to my link handler by default but if I want to open something in like w3m what I have to do is set it manual set my browser to w3m open it open the link in the browser and then set it back to whatever my other browser was so if I want to open this in w3m which again is just a terminal web browser this gives you me a more clean thing where I can click on the links and stuff like that it's basically works just like any other browser I also have MPV so let's say let me go to you know some YouTube channel so if I am here and notice I have this map to comma V all these macros are preceded by comma by the way but if I go to this link or even if I'm just hovering over it here and I press comma V that is going to bring up the video in MPV and it's going to open it through i3 just so if I close news boat I think that the video should remain persistent so I can have this here and that that's nice but anyway so that that's basically opening links how you can use different programs and stuff like that so other things updating the RSS feed or their RSS feeds so keep in mind that each one of these is just a different file on the internet and the RSS feed reader has to check those if you want to get constant updates now you can set this setting up here auto reload - yes I actually don't have that now what this is going to do is it's going to automatically load every feed when you open news boat I don't necessarily like that now inside of news boat you can basically download an RSS feed by pressing R and it's gonna check for that particular link or you can press capital R and it loads all of them but I've the way I actually like to do it is have it in have a cron job for it so if I go to my cron tab you will see that every 20 minutes I have it automatically run this command News boat X reload and that just basically reloads it downloads all the new URLs and stuff like that in the background it doesn't open anything up which is pretty nice so that that's all you need to know about updating so you can basically either manually do them or just have it have it do it in the background now aside from that I should say that you know I can open up my URLs here again this is just the news boat slash URLs file and again this is where you put each line is each line here is just an entry that you have in your RSS feed reader but there are some sites so YouTube you just sort of have to know this if you want a youtube video for example you have to put it in this format here or excuse me a YouTube channel where you have youtube.com slash feeds slash video XML channel ID equals blah blah blah that means you have to look up the actual channel ID for a channel which is sort of a pain there are a couple different ways of doing that it's sort of a thing because YouTube doesn't actually like just put a link to the RSS feed like on the that would actually be really helpful but all you have to do if you want to get that is you know let's just click on one of my videos and you can go right click and say view page source and if you just search here or channel ID that's probably yeah so it's gonna give you my channel ID just as long as you don't get it confused with like some other channel that's advertised on the the page or something like that now I will say this actually was on the forum either yet today or yesterday and you can also if you have something like YouTube viewer you can actually just run this command here I actually tried it and works you can just take this and put in a video url and it'll automatically extract the channel ID and you can throw it in here so that's how you do YouTube links Twitter is the same way Twitter doesn't automatically have RSS feeds but there is this site twit RSS Don me if you just go to that it allows you to like activate an RSS feed for Twitter and you can just throw the URL in that and that works fine so yeah so that's about it um I think I feel like we talked about everything I'm a little confused I actually recorded this video before and like didn't get all the stuff I wanted to get in so I know I'm like confused what I said and what I didn't say but anyway so that that's about it it's really nice using one of these just because you don't have to worry about constantly you know checking different sites or something like that or you know it's again it's very lightweight it's very usable I can basically I mean this is how I really watch all the YouTube videos I watch more or less which it actually since you only have the feeds you specifically asked for it's a little less distracting than watching on YouTube so I just have to say I don't I don't actually watch it on the site ever but you know this is nice for like watching the stuff that I know I'm gonna end up watching in different ways um alright so that's about it hope you guys enjoyed it I'll be having more videos soon so I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Luke Smith

Views: 45,868

Rating: 4.9323382 out of 5

Keywords: configure, not related, newsboat, bindings, privacy, config, gentoo, blog, tui, social, really simple syndication, news, arch, url, linux, ncurses, social media, vi, rice, syndicate, luke smith, new, git, real simple syndication, podcast, podboat, twitter, extensible, mpv, github, rss, macos, emacs, vim, edit, xml, newsbeuter, install, open, browser, gnu, dotfiles, cli, terminal, podbeuter, botnet

Id: dUFCRqs822w

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018