Proposal for Tent-RSS bi-directional bridge.

gistfile1.md

Tent <-> RSS Bridge

Needs a name (smoke-signals?)

This is an open source, hosted, bi-directional bridge of Tent and RSS. It would be hosted somewhere, and installed as an app against your tent server.

Using Python, because it doesn't make us claw our eyes out. Likely with the Flask framework.

Register as an app

• a screen to enter your entity
• server does v0.3 tent app registration
• needs access to status posts, and perhaps essay posts.

Reading a Feed

• dashboard lets us add in an RSS feed url
• app needs to fetch it and parse it regularly (30mins? hour?)
  • feedparser is pretty good at this: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/feedparser
• needs to keep track of last seen item (by item guid? many feeds suck at guids...)
• on new items, create a new post on the users feed
  • for microblogging, it could be a status post with the feed item title and link
  • it could create an essay, with the feed item content as the essay content
  • it could create a new rss-archive post (pick a name), if the user didn't want to publicly share it.

Creating a Feed

• dashboard should let a user generate a feed from his status (and essay?) posts
• optionally allow filtering
  • ex: only create feed of posts with the word "#feed" in it
• not needed at first, but cool idea: Feeds based on tag posts. tent/tent.io#183

Some interesting ideas though:

• One is setting up a bridge to crosspost from an RSS feed to an entity, as his own status posts (or other type if you desire).
• The other is "subscribing" to the feed, and wanting to get notifications when there are new posts, but not wanting to "own" the posts, like the first option would do.

I originally assumed we were only doing the first, but the second is interesting still.

@seanmonstar: yes, the idea behind private feeds is to alert the user whenever there is a new item feed, plus avoids everyone to see it. Posted messages by the webservice entity would be limited to only the subscriber (even if the same item has to be sent to several users).

@seanmonstar, @jacook: Although private mode is easier to implement, I think public mode should be implemented first.

Let's go :)

Alright guys we have a repo. Let's move further discussion there. Let me know if you would like to be a collaborator.
smoke-signals