Episode: 485
Title: HPR0485: Newsbeuter
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0485/hpr0485.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:32:05

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Thank you.
Hi, my name is Gordon Sinclair and I am known on IRC as this whole web. This episode
is going to be about a little command line RSS aggregator called NewsBeauter. But before
getting into that, what I am going to do is give a brief idea of what RSS is because
it surprises me how many people that I have come across who have never crossed paths with
the concept of RSS. They are perfectly PC literate people, they have used computers for years,
this is for some reason, it has never occurred to them. What that RSS symbol means when they
sit on a web page or what subscribing is what their advantages are, that type of thing.
So I am going to give a brief bit about that first. So RSS, the idea is if you go to a
blog page, if you read 3 or 4 blogs regularly, without RSS you would have to bookmark all
these pages and then remember, I have not checked that blog for half an hour, I will go and
click on that and open it and see if there is a new story, see if there is a new post,
I will not, there is still not a new post. And remember, I was an hour ago before I
checked it, I will go and open that bookmark again and see if there is a new post. Well RSS does
away with that, RSS means that you can subscribe to that blogger's feed, that RSS feed in an aggregator
program, and that aggregator, you list all of your RSS feeds from all of the blogs, all
of the news sites, anything that updates and it has a feed, you can subscribe in the
one program. That way when you go to refresh your RSS, your feed aggregator, when you open
that and refresh it, it searches for all new posts and it tells you, oh there is a new post
on this website, nothing new in this one, nothing new in this one, there are two new ones
on this one. It is like the layout is pretty much like an email client where the title and
the body of the text shows up, the body may be a teaser with the idea that you click on
it, to read the rest of the story and then it will open up the actual page with the post,
it may be the full thing is listed in the RSS feed, that is entirely dependent on the
actual blogger of the webmaster and what they choose. So it is really simple, it means that
you can with a single click, you can refresh all of your feeds and see just a glance which
ones have new posts, which ones haven't. And then with the new posts you can look at the
title and the side, now that post doesn't really appeal to me, I will just mark it as read,
it is like an email, I will just mark it as read, I am not interested in it or you can
look at the little blog and think, no it sounds kind of, no I won't bother, you know.
So you've got all that freedom. The other advantage is you don't have to give out any email
information to get this advantage, I am wary in general of mailing lists, although that
is down to the administrator, a lot of, because it has a legacy, all force projects are pretty
reputable with email, email lists, that if you tell it to unsubscribe you, that it will actually
do that and that they won't sell your email information, whatever. Beyond force projects,
it's hat and mess, you've got to judge the project of the site itself and try to work out if
they're going to be honest with you or not. RSS feeds do away with that altogether because you
don't give any email information to anyone. You know, if you subscribe to my blog, for example,
I don't, the only thing that I see is the client that you've used, the aggregator program that you
used, but you are just one of numbers, you know, it doesn't mean anything and if you don't like
if you subscribe to my blog and then decide, no it's not really what I thought it was going to be,
what's fine, not all you need to do is delete my feed from your feed reader and I'm going,
you want, you know, there's absolutely nothing I can do about that, you have complete control.
The other advantage of RSS is you can webmasters can aggregate stuff into planets,
and my blog is on the linuxplanet.org feed, so if you subscribe to that one, you get the feed,
the blog posts, aggregated from myself and lots of other people, lots of other linux and
open source people, all on one feed so that, you know, when you refresh your feeder, your feed
reader, sorry, you may have like nine new posts, two from one person, you know, one from someone else,
and three from someone else, and one from someone else, and none from other people, you know,
so you can do all that with RSS, you can build together things like a planet.
So anyway, with that, you've got, you need some sort of an aggregator program,
and these come in all shapes and sizes, you can be like standalone ones, light and use
computer, they can be fully across platform, native Windows, readers, native OSX readers, native
readers, and Android and iPhone, you know, built into web browsers, and other ones for Firefox,
and there's millions of them in all shapes and sizes, with all different toolcats and languages,
and whatever, and NewsBeauter happens to be a really nice one, it's a command line one, it runs
inside the terminal, so that's what I am using now, it's what I've been using for a while now,
actually, so there's the difference between a podcast and a new podcast feed, and a news or a
blog feed, is basically the podcast one or the audio cast, video cast, whatever, has an additional
piece of information, like a link to a video file, or a link to an audio file, and enclosure,
basically, with that link inside it, so that the podcast aggregator knows that, oh, right,
this is an MP3 file, this is how I handle this, I go and download it into this folder,
and sync it to this one, and convert it, and sync it, and whatever, so it's basically,
it's just additional information in the feed itself, and the post feed itself, that's all,
so basically, for a news feed, a news reader, an RSS reader, to be able to do podcasts,
all it needs to be able to do is recognize that additional enclosure for what it is, and then
have instructions for what to do with it, that's all, it's still a normal RSS feed, each of the
podcasts, or audio cast, video cast, whatever, each, there's lots of different ways of doing that,
and depending on whether you post with WordPress, or Drupal, or whatever add-ons you're using it to do it,
or whether it's written for iTunes, or whatever, but basically, of all different syntaxes and
ways of doing it, that's the basic premise, that it's an enclosure with a file, I don't like to
have a file, so I apologize for rambling a bit for people who already know what RSS is in the
advantages, as I said, I just found that a lot of people, surprisingly a lot of people had never
heard of RSS, and can get so much benefit out of it, if they only knew that it existed,
so on to the main topic, which is newsbeater, there's also an application called podbeater,
there's a command called podbeater, podbeater is a function of newsbeater, you install newsbeater,
and you already have podbeater, newsbeater is one of many RSS readers, aggregators, as I've
said, so what it is, is a command line interface, you install it, and you run it just by typing
newsbeater in the terminal and pressing enter, what that will do is open it up, and it will show you
your feeds, and what other status they're in, what it won't do is refresh your feeds, for that,
you can either shift in R, all the buttons are on the bottom of the R, they're constantly there,
so it's like Q equals Qt, enter as open N as next, you know, all the keys are on the bottom,
what you can do to run it and automatically refresh to run it, and then have it refresh itself,
is run it as a newsbeater, space minus R, small R, that will do that,
when you have to move in and out of the feeds, it'll tell you when you've got a new feed,
it'll mark the feed as a capital N, and it'll say like one of 52 or whatever, I mean you've got
one new post inside the 52 that are listed, they're 51, they're all marked as red,
so to move in and out of these feeds, simply a case of up and down arrows to highlight the line you want,
and then hit enter, and that'll take you into the either the feed itself,
then you click on the title, or the other way to do it is just N, N will move you to the next
unread feed, and the first time you do that is N and then enter, I'll let that display the first
unread title, you can move the page up and down arrows, the page up and down keys,
to jump a full page up and down, or the up and down arrows, just to scroll it up and down,
when you've read that one post hit N and it'll automatically move to the next,
the next unread post already open, so you just click keep hand N and it'll work its way through,
it'll jump from the unread feed to the next unread feed, I'll just skip out everything that's been
read, and to move back up the way, Q, if you're in a post, Q will take you back to that feeds
posts, and then Q again, I'll take you back up to your overall list of feeds, so it's Q and
enter is basically in and out of the menus, when if you want to start later on down the line,
if you've got a list of feeds and you think all right, the sixth one on the line, I've been
waiting on that one, I'll just skip straight to that one and read that one first, but you can do
that, and when you've read that and you press N, when it gets to the end of the list, it'll
automatically go back to the start of the list again, of the unread one, so you won't miss anything,
just keep hitting N, you won't miss anything, if you have, you can choose whether or not to read
the feeds, if you see a title that a post doesn't interest you, you don't have to read it,
it picked the ones that you want to read, and then capital A will mark all of that feed as red,
it'll take all the ends, the capital ends away from the posts, or if you're up at the feeds level,
capital C will mark every feed, excuse me, will mark every feed as being red, which is just
great handy at times, so that's a general idea of newsbuyer, now as I said, newsbuyer also has
a podcasting, a pod catcher angle to it as well, so you'll notice when you start running this,
I'm going in here to, I've got a newsbuyer open, I'm going into my five live football daily,
that's proper football for just for the Americans last thing, the game that you play football with the
ball by your foot, so I'll start on my side, so I've got an episode here that I listened to last night,
it's Carlos Alberto from the 1970s Brazil team being interviewed, but anyway I'll click on that,
her enter, sorry on that, and it's just a normal, this is a podcast feed, it happens to be an audio
podcast, an MP3, the only difference between this and a regular blog or news feed is the fact that
it's got an additional part, it's got a link and a podcast download URL, I've noticed on some
they can be one and the same thing, I think, that's actually the same thing, it's two, a copy of
two links, well that's not quite, anyway, that is the only difference, is the odd the podcasts,
the video casts, audio casts have an additional enclosure with a link to the media file, and you'll see
that, it's like link, HTTP, slash downloads dot bbc dot go dot you gave whatever,
the way to do this, or the way to actually get it, downloading, is if you hit E, just small E,
what that'll do is incure, so let's listen on the bottom, it'll incure, it'll tell you that it's
added that link to the Q file, so once you work your way through and Q, all your audio casts,
your video casts, whatever, you then run pod viewer to download them, so Q to come right back out,
when you're on the feeds list and hit Q, it quits the program and brings you back to the terminal
again, so at that point, it's just pod viewer, what that'll do is then show you the Q, and it
would then have, in that case, in my case there, it's now got, well, I didn't actually include
it this time, but it would have, the Carlos Alberta interview with the bbc listed as a Q,
at this point, it's simply a case of, you can move up or down, then hit D to download them individually,
or you can do it easy way, which is just press A, and that'll download all of them,
Q to come back out of that, when they're downloaded, they'll be shown as like two out of four or
whatever, when they're fully downloaded, it'll change to like four out of four, that total of four
stays until you actually purge them from the list, it's a capital P to purge them from the list,
again, these are all things that are listed along the bottom of the, along the bottom of the client,
all the keyboard shortcuts are along the bottom of the client, the newsbeater documentation
at newsbeater.org is brilliant, it really is brilliant, the only issue that I had was I didn't find
it very clear at all on how to actually get the ear podcast URLs into newsbeater, into pod
to actually subscribe to and use these features, now the way to do that is you've got two config
files from newsbeater, one is a hidden file in your home folder, which is dot newsbeater slash URLs,
and that is a blank text file, it's a plain text file, and you just put all of your URLs,
all of your feeds in there, one in each line, now pod beater doesn't have, by default, it uses
the same config file as newsbeater, you can tell otherwise, you can have it set up as a separate
config file, I think that's more, more hassle than it's worth to be honest, so what I've done is I've
got all of my, my text, feeds at my blogs and articles and things like that, first, on the list,
and then everything below like the five live one, they're all podcasts or video casts or audio casts,
so that's the way that I do it, the advantage of doing it that way is I have an ISP package where
my bandwidth is adds up during the day, I've got a limited amount of bandwidth during the day,
and I can check my RSS feeds, anything I want, and read them, mark them as red, send podcasts to
the queue, and then when it comes to midnight, my bandwidth's unmetered, so therefore there I can
go on and download them all, and run pod beater and download them all in one sweep, so that's what I do,
so that's that's an advantage of of this, so put your URLs all in one feed,
there's a secondary config file, and slash, essay slash, newsbeater slash config, I think,
I've done a blog post anyway, I'm going to use the blog post as the show notes which explains all
of this, so that'll be my show notes, and there you can set the download location, the default
download location, as well as the parameters for that, whether it gets the name of the feed
in terms of any folder, or whether it just puts the, you know, all of that's in the show notes,
and on the newsbeater documentation site which I'm linking to as well, until how many downloads
you can, you'll accept at one time to try and meet your bandwidth, you know, there's various things
like that, as well as what the default browser is, or default player is, now the default player
isn't so much of a big deal for me, because I tend to just download them and then I'll use
audacious, manually to queue up things, and just moving from folder to folder and ardent to the
playlist, but you can set up a default player, and then just play it from newsbeater,
I forgot to mention the O key, and O button, O is actually quite handy because
newsbeater is text-based, it's all with terminal, and sometimes I've seen people post
things like screenshots, or links to YouTube videos, or a boy-boying videos, or whatever,
and you can't get them through a terminal, you need to be in some visual browser,
so if you see a post in a newsbeater that needs that, and you want to see some of the pictures
of posting or whatever, then simply pressing O will open that page automatically in the default
web browser that you've chosen, and you've told it in XA slash and newsbeater slash config,
this can be useful, I don't use it very often to be honest, but it can be useful every now and
again just to have that function. The downside to that though is, it seems that it's open
a web browser, and actually run Firefox or whatever, it sort of takes newsbeater, it puts that
in a sort of stasis, and you can't actually use newsbeater, the terminals like blank, until you
close the web browser again, you've read that page, you've looked at the pictures and you've
yet closed, and then it recognizes, oh it's being closed, and it brings newsbeater back,
I don't know if that's the idea, but it brings you back to the page, the post you were looking at
in the newsbeater, where you left off, I don't know if that's a design, floor, or part of the
plan, I don't know, but I don't find that much of a big deal. So anyway, between those two newsbeater
and podbeater, there should be in the repos, excuse me, I would imagine they'd been in the repos
for your distribution, they are further like command line, they are awesome,
oh excuse me, this is what happens when winter comes in, you start to pick up a cough,
so I've noticed as well, Clot who had asked about if anyone knew about an RSS,
a command line, RSS aggregator, I emailed him and let him know about newsbeater and he couldn't
pronounce it, so all I can say is, I have a struggle with it as well for a while, and then I eventually
figured out that newsbeater, as a new beauty, or for the Aussies, it was bugged night,
so newsbeater, either way, it's a fantastic little application, and if you like things small
light, and you like the terminal, the command line ups, then give it a go, so that's it for this
episode, and I have been Gordon Sinclair, I'm on free node as an IRC and free node as thistleweb,
my blog if anyone's interested, now I've given you a great little app to subscribe to the blogs
and things if you want to subscribe to mine by all means go for it, it's thistleweb.co.uk
and I'll include some stuff in the show notes, so until next time, thanks for listening.