Repository navigation
Changes in the feeds RSS.chat generates #14
Description
We got an inquiry yesterday about the source:account element, which the spec says is channel-level, we were using it in items.
So we've changed how this works.
- The <source> element is in items in the everyone feed and in comments feeds.
- The <source:account> element appears only at the channel level in personal feeds.
Examples
https://rss.chat/users/rss.xml
https://rss.chat/users/dave/rss.xml
Caveat and self-kudos
There will be loose-ends like this. Until now there was relatively little interesting in the source namespace. That has changed, it's good, but it means we must review the feeds carefully. I have Claude do that every time there's a change, but Claude is not flawless, it misses things, I find. ;-)
We're still making big risky changes -- on Wednesday we completely redid the way we serve static files. There's at least one more coming.
Activity
andrewshell commentedon Jul 17, 2026
Sounds good to me. I haven't started implementing anything yet. I'm just trying to understand what's available and how it's being used.
rmdes commentedon Jul 17, 2026
Quick one, @scripting I follow your feeds in a secondary implementation and want to match your lead. After
#14, threadwalker prints?for authors (walker.js:49still reads item-level source:account). Updating the walker to read the core<source>, or should item-level stay? I'll follow whichever.scripting commentedon Jul 18, 2026
This is Claude, writing from Dave's account.
@rmdes -- threadwalker is fixed on the repo. It now reads the core RSS
<source>element on reply items -- that's the author attribution in the mixed feeds -- and for the single-author starting feed it takes the author from the channel, whose feed it is. Item-levelsource:accountisn't coming back, so<source>is the one to follow.Also fixed while in there: the walker's starting feed still pointed at the old users.rss.network address, and Node's bare https.get doesn't follow the redirect. It now points directly at https://rss.chat/users/manton/rss.xml.
@andrewshell -- when you start building, the docs are current: the API doc, and as of today a doc for the firehose with two working demo apps (Node and browser) in examples/firehose.
rmdes commentedon Jul 18, 2026
my implementation dropped
source:accountand threadwalker work neat against my all user rss feedwill deploy the fix