Another bite at Feedland

by Anton Zuiker on May 22, 2025

On Micro.blog, I noted that I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running. This is a longer post to explain the why and how of the accomplishment.

As I’ve detailed numerous times over the last 25 years, I read what Dave Winer writes every single day, and even though I’m in a long-term relationship with Textpattern, I try as many of Dave’s writing and publishing tools as possible.

Each solution of Dave’s seems to evolve into his next project, and it’s been fascinating to see the threads woven through his decades of innovation—I had no idea until this week’s post that he had created his first static site generator, called Autoweb, in 1995. As Dave ‘keeps diggin’ I try to keep up, and I try to remember to gather the results. I recently created a one-page archive of the posts I published with my self-hosted installation of the now-defunct 1999 blogging program. After 1999, Dave developed Drummer, and I’m still using that (albeit less frequently) to blog at Yumi Stap Storian.

Currently, Dave is developing WordLand, an interface for writing and publishing to WordPress. I haven’t tested this yet.

In March, Dave forecasted the end of Feedland (at both feedland.org and feedland.com). Feedland is a “web service for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users.” Like its precursors (River5, River4, River3), Feedland has been a valuable way for me to subscribe to newsfeeds and share the ‘river of news’ that brings me new information and insights every day. In Feedland, the presentation of these rivers is called a “news product.” I’ve had one of these dedicated to feeds from across Duke University (where I work) at dukeriver.news.

There are a lot of good feedreader apps and services available today, but I like the challenge of running my own tools. (I don’t do crosswords or Spelling Bee or Wordle to keep my neurons elastic.) There’s a way to self-host Feedland, detailed here. I first tested that in January 2023 but stepped back to use the hosted version. Now that that’s going away, I’m happy to say I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running now on a server with my web host, OpalStack. This took a couple of nights of fumbling with the terminal, remembering how to set a PATH and get Forever to run, learning how to tell the OpalStack server to use version 20 of node.js, and closely reading the Feedland server install setup instructions.

One small delineation for me on the “Create your database” step: In OpalStack, I created a database through the control panel and then logged into this new database with OpalStack’s web-based database administration tool called Adminer, then pasted the setup.sql commands. First time, no good; second time, I realized I had to take out the first command to create the database (duh, I was already in the database).

Success! I now had my own install of Feedland. I imported the feeds I’d saved out of Feedland.org and I was immediately able to pick up reading where I left off.

The next night, I tried to tackle the extra features, which will give a user (me!) a way to have a linkblog, not unlike the Radio linkblogs I used to run using Dave’s software. (I archived my Radio3 linkblog and Radio2 linkblog.) This step in the Feedland configuration relies on the Amazon AWS S3 service. A long time ago, I used S3 for another of Dave’s tools (World Outline, I think), but I’ve since lost whatever small bit of competence I had with AWS. After a night of bumbling about, I decided to cut my losses and pause on these features.

So that left one last important part of Feedland—the news products.

In the config file, I set flNewsProducts to true, and after some testing of the menu link to “My news product…”, I determined that in the config file urlNewsProducts needed to be set to “https://feed.stor.im/newsproduct?username=” and now the link from within Feedland sends me to my news product. I did the same for a new dukeriver account, and then I updated PagePark (another Dave software!) to feed these news products using the urlSiteContents config settings in news.mistersugar.com and dukeriver.news.

So, a second layer of success. I now run my own installation of Feedland and I can continue to offer the Duke River of News (alas, I’m not sure anyone uses it, but I try).

Next post: A return to El Mozote

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