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Snownews on SDF
September 30th, 2017
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I like rss.

I like newsbeuter.

I do not like that newsbeuter doesn't work on SDF and I can't get
any help from bboard to upgrade it to the newest git version.
Pkgsrc has a horribly out-of-date version that fails to launch.

Then there's snownews. I never had any luck with it in the past. It
rejects most RSS feeds and pisses me off. There aren't many
customization optons.

I have tt-rss set up, but every time I want to login it tells me my
password is wrong and I have to go reset it in maint. Half the time
the site is down or too slow to use. It's also not available to me
on the command line, where I live my life. If newsbeuter were
working, I could route my tt-rss stuff through it for fun & profit,
but... yeah.

So I'm back to snownews, the only other option on SDF. Here's what
I found:

SNOWNEWS DOESN'T SUPPORT HTTPS!

That's the heart of the problem. And the solution is pretty simple.
Don't rely on snownews to fetch your content. When adding a feed,
add it this way:

exec:wget -q -O - https://web.address/of/a/feed

Wget handles the request and passes it in to snownews and
everything is good in life. Well, at least everything isn't
complete crap. It's a start!

PS: If you can help me get newsbeuter working on SDF I'll buy you
ice cream
.