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This is your Elfeed on Gopher
January 22nd, 2021
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I'm happy to say that my PR for Elfeed has been merged into master which means
that you can now use Elfeed to keep track of your favorite phlog's feeds. [1]

Elfeed is a an extensible feed reader for Emacs and I use it heavily for
everything on the WWW, but found myself increasingly wanted to read phlogs from
Elfeed without having to go to Elpher [2] and manually scan through my
bookmarks.

It turns out the PR was fairly simple as there were two components that needed
updating.  The first is that Elfeed was originally designed for HTTP(S), but
someone had recently added the ability to pull feeds from a local file, which
meant that there were mechanisms to bypass header verification and all that.  I
was able to reuse that code when checking URLs for gopher protocols.

The second point, and the most important, was that Elfeed uses cURL by default
for its backend (with an Elisp fallback if needed), and recent versions of cURL
support gopher out of the box.

So this PR felt more like re-plumbing some of Elfeed's cURL internals around
instead of a massive overhaul to get the feeds working.  It took me longer to
understand the functions for async feed checking than it did to implement the
fix.

But I still have an issue opened up re: Elfeed and gopher [3] as I'd like to
eventually get gopher links to open in an appropriate browser.  Emacs' internal
`browse-url' and its cohort is likely being called and it may be set up
specifically for the web.  I might take this as an opportunity to dust off my
FSF waiver to contribute to Emacs' core to build in a handler for multiple
protocols if that doesn't already exist. (It probably does.)

In the meantime, if you like feeds and CLIs and aren't necessarily into Emacs,
then I'd recommend you try ~dacav's (a fellow of ~.institute) "crossbow"
aggregator [4] which is supported on OpenBSD, among other platforms which
easily handles gopher RSS feeds.

Finally, I'd encourage all of you to publish your phlog feeds over gopher!  If
you're a fellow ~.institute person, then "burrow" should be already creating an
RSS feed for your gopherhole (according to the default configuration from
/etc/burrow/config) so all you'd need to do is provide a link to the file to
make it obvious that it's there.

I added mine via

0RSS    rss.xml

in my gophermap so it's clear to others that they can follow me.

[1] - https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/pull/410
[2] - https://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher/
[3] - https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/issues/408
[4] - https://gitlab.com/dacav/crossbow