06 december 2017
centralfeels, tilde.town's latest feels in reverse-chronological order
I made a thing to make it easier to browse everybody's feels on the web.
On mobile, it's hard to download ConnectBot or the iOS equivalent and set it up just to read some feels.
This problem is frustrating because feels that fellow townies have made public are in fact available on the web. The only difficuly is that they're scattered throughout tilde.town's user pages and subdirectories.
centralfeels solves the above issues by making the equivalent of "global feels" on ttbp available on the web. Feels are presented in reverse-chronological order and are updated four times a day.
Since most townies may not be comfortable with having their thoughts collected and made available in a centralised location, centralfeels is disabled by default. Even when enabled, it only picks up those entries which were available publicly in the first place. If you want o be extra-cautious about some particularly private entries, please chmod 700 them. I cannot recommend this enough.
I have not, do not and will not collect feels from your directory without your express permission. You can signal your approval to have your feels be made available on centralfeels by creating a file named ".centralfeels" in your home directory. Once you do that, your feels will begin appearing on centralfeels. It might take a quarter-of-a-day for centralfeels to respond to the presence or absence of the ".centralfeels" file. If you want it done immediately, you can simply run /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels yourself. I've tried my best to make it possible for you to do this, for example, by changing the group owner of /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels and /home/login/public_html/centralfeels/data.json to "town". I've done this in good faith, and it is entirely possible for a mischievous townie to make centralfeels say whatever she/he wants. Please don't do this, otherwise we won't be able to have nice things. If, by chance, you need sudo to run the script, ~vilmibm (tireless maintainer and benevolent overlord of tilde.town) may be able to run it for you.
I'd like to thank ~endorphant for creating such a ridiculously awesome blogging platform, and of course ~vilmibm for creating the Universe inside which ttbp exists, but a solar system. I'd also like to extend my thanks to everybody else for their invaluable contributions to tilde.town in word and code. Without you, tilde.town wouldn't be such a fantastic place.
Without further ado, I'd like to present to you: CENTRALFEELS.
Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoy centralfeels as much as I enjoyed making it. 🍾
P.S. The source code is at /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels. Improvements are welcome. However, if you read it, you will know exactly how spaghetti-like I write my code. My only defence is that I'm working on becoming better at writing code.
P.P.S. If you'd like to develop your own UI (or a native centralfeels app or something like that), the data for the twenty latest entries is stored at https://tilde.town/~login/centralfeels/data.json.