FOSSPicks
Tiny Tiny RSS
There's a noticeable trend that is almost tracking the trajectory of command-line use, albeit a decade behind: the move away from cloud-hosted services. This may be because many of us now have enough network capacity at home, are willing to set up our own servers, or perhaps pay for a micro-service site for running a few web applications. But there are significant advantages in going your own way, not least of which is knowing you're in control of both your own data and your own support destiny. It frees you of any nagging doubts about privacy, or a service being withdrawn, and puts you back in control of your personal information. It's why wallabag is so popular for caching web pages, and why Tiny Tiny RSS is still going strong after 17 years.
Good websites still offer their own RSS feeds, and these will contain their story updates along with a synopsis of each story and a corresponding link. You then use a feed reader such as Tiny Tiny RSS to track those updates across your own organized library of subscribed RSS feeds. But Tiny Tiny RSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator as well as being a web-based RSS reader and it performs the same job as the wonderful but entirely defunct Google Reader, or the still alive Feedly. Tiny Tiny RSS is a server for collecting your feeds and for synchronizing their read-state across your RSS clients, but it's also a brilliant place to consume content. After so many years in development, the reading web interface is better than most desktop clients. There are plugins and themes, a two or three-pane view for reading articles alongside the article list, automatic filtering, a JSON API, deduplication, great feed management, and of course, the ability to import and export OPML lists of your already curated list of RSS feeds. If you've already set up a server to run wallabag, for example, running this alongside is the perfect augmentation.
Project Website
JSON viewer
fx
JSON is the JavaScript Object Notation format, used by JavaScript programmers to describe data structures within an easily readable text format. Of course, JavaScript programmers still use JSON, but the format long ago escaped the confines of web-based client-side programming to become a "commonly used data interchange format," alongside YAML, XML, and even CSV. As a result, many API and command-line tools, alongside vital infrastructure such as journald, can output text-based data as JSON so that it can more easily be interpreted by another programming language while still making sense to humans. This is great for machines, but not so brilliant for humans, and it's the life of the JSON-loving human that this brilliant little utility wants to make easier.
The problem with JSON is that while it is readable as raw text, humans find it hard to navigate. Like JavaScript and many other programming languages, the hierarchy and scope of data in a JSON file is represented by curly brackets, double-quotes, and a variety of other elements. A JSON-aware editor can make this much easier to parse, but so too can tools such as jq and fx. And while jq can convert JSON into something easier to read, fx makes it easier to read and easier to navigate interactively. It can do this either with JSON piped into it or from a file, and when the JSON is opened you initially see only the global enclosing brackets for the entire file. Press cursor-right to open this, and cursor-down to navigate into the next section. In this way, you can unfold and fold the hierarchy to better see how everything fits together. You can search too with / and n and N keys for next and previous. It's quick and easy, and it also reveals how much more useful JSON is than flat text – even to humans.
Project Website
https://github.com/antonmedv/fx
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia