Wacky!

_posts/2020-07-07-newsboat-wacky-feeds.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Reading RSS feeds from wacky protocols with newsboat"
+tags:
+- rss
+- newsboat
+---
+
+Much of the information I read during the day, not counting e-mail, comes from
+my RSS reader: [Newsboat](https://newsboat.org). Whenever I see an interesting
+blog post on Twitter or elsewhere, I habitually subscribe the author's RSS
+feed. I recently stumbled across an interesting RSS feed which wasn't served
+over HTTP, leading me to wonder: how can I subscribe?
+
+After trying to find some way to make newsboat read a different protocol,
+racking my brains thinking of different ways to set up a stub HTTP proxy, I
+finally succumbed and read the manpage.
+
+As my luck would have it, the `urls` file that newsboat stores its URLs
+supports a special `exec` syntax for shelling out to run a command to fetch the feed,
+for example:
+
+
+`~/.newsboat/urls`
+
+```
+"exec:ssh shellhost 'cat /srv/www/rss.xml'"
+"exec /usr/bin/torify curl ftp://someftp/rss.xml"
+"exec:/usr/bin/torify curl gopher://example.com/0/news.atom.xml"
+```
+
+(_Side note:_ do you have any idea how many protocols `curl` supports? **Lots**! On my machine: `dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp`)
+
+
+The `exec` syntax is certainly a novel feature. As I have been pondering it
+more, I have been thinking about is using it to run
+_arbitrary shell scripts_ which would generate reports for review. Some ideas that have come to mind:
+
+* Reading the root's mbox on my local and remote machines to get better visibility into the status of cron jobs.
+* Executing some `aws-cli` and `az` scripts to grab generate some daily cost reports.
+* Retrieving error logs from remote machines to tabulate a daily error report.
+
+There are other possibilities that come to mind, but it all basically boils
+down to generating information dashboards which will help me keep tabs on more
+and more things, all from within my feed reader.
+
+I have only just started to experiment with this idea, but I'm looking forward
+to poking around with this more.