2025-09-02 Feeds
================

I am once again thinking of the feed as a generic single-file export
format (RSS or Atom, it doesn't matter to me). Does that make sense?
Or would it make more sense to just zip HTML and images? The only
benefit of using a feed is that the format is standardised, I guess.

Feeds as an export format only if the feed items contain images as
attachments or as data URIs 😨 I guess? I mean, feeds are good enough
to feed the text of pages into a search engine like Xobaque, but if
the feed is supposed to act as real export format, the other assets
are also important.

And what happens if an image is used by two pages? The feed format
would mean that both pages need to declare it as an attachment, no? So
I'm guessing, the feed as a universal import and export mechanism is
just not good enough.

Nevertheless, Oddμ has two feed exports on the command-line:

* oddmu-export(1), to export all the pages in a single feed file. Use
  this for the initial load of a site into Xobaque.

* oddmu-feed(1), to render a feed for a single page. Use this for the
  initial load of a particular hashtag into Xobaque. Take Emacs, for
  example. If you just look at the online feed, it contains the last
  ten items. The feed subcommand, on the other hand, generates a feed
  containing all the items.

And yet, I think the archive action (not enabled on this site) is the
more useful one, in general. Except the archive contains the Markdown
files, not the HTML files. So you still need to run oddmu-static(1)
to generate the static site.

Lately, I've been writing a shell script to take an HTML export from
Oddmuse sites and convert them to Oddμ sites. This requires a
conversion from HTML to Markdown (getting rid of the quirky wiki
markup). I'm using html2markdown even though it's "sponsored by 🔥
Firecrawl, where you can scrape any website and turn it into AI
friendly markdown with one API call." 🤮 There are two alternatives
written in Python: html2text translates HTML to text that happens to
be Markdown; html2markdown does that and preserves untranslated HTML.
Something to keep in mind!

#Oddμ #Xobaque

2025-09-08. I got a friendly email from adia pointing me in the right
direction: Wordpress has an export format that is one huge feed
without media files.

> Your export file doesn’t actually contain your media library (like
> photos, videos, audio, etc.). -- Export your website’s content