Installation of antennaApp

antenna is a tool for working with RSS feeds and rendering a link blog. It is inspired by Dave Winer’s Textcasting and FeedLand and my own experimental website, antenna.

The approach I am taking is to make it easy to curate feeds and generated a static website using a simple command line tool. I believe that a link blog which can consume and generate RSS can be a basis for a truly distributed social web. It avoids the complexity of solutions like ATProto and ActivityPub.

Features:

support for multiple collections of feeds
a collection is defined by a Markdown document containing a list of links to feeds
collections can be harvested, meaning content retrieved from the feeds listed in the Markdown document
harvested content is stored in a SQLite3 database
harvested content in a collection can be aggregated and rendered as an HTML page for reading
Markdown documents can be imported into a collection as a feed item
RSS 2.0 XML and HTML are generated per collection
A preview feature to view the render content in your web browser via a localhost URL
You can manage your collections via a localhost URL too.

The ability to harvest feed items means we can read what others post on the web. The Markdown content can be added to a feed allows us to comment on the items read (thus being social).

Through YAML configuration files you can customize the HTML rendered by antenna on a per collection basis. That means it is possible to recreate a “news paper” like experience.

A static website using antenna can grow through either enhancing the HTML markup defined in the YAML configuration or through manipulation of the collection contents in the SQLite3 database. This provides opportunities to integrate with other static website tools like PageFind and FlatLake. You can even use {app_name} to augment your existing blog.

Quick install with curl or irm

There is an experimental installer.sh script that can be run with the following command to install latest table release. This may work for macOS, Linux and if you’re using Windows with the Unix subsystem. This would be run from your shell (e.g. Terminal on macOS).

curl https://rsdoiel.github.io/antennaApp/installer.sh | sh

This will install the programs included in antennaApp in your $HOME/bin directory.

If you are running Windows 10 or 11 use the Powershell command below.

irm https://rsdoiel.github.io/antennaApp/installer.ps1 | iex

If your are running macOS or Windows

You may get security warnings if you are using macOS or Windows. See the notes for the specific operating system you’re using to fix issues.

Installing from source

Required software

Go >= 1.25.1
CMTools >= 0.0.40

Steps

git clone https://github.com/rsdoiel/antennaApp
Change directory into the antennaApp directory
Make to build, test and install

git clone https://github.com/rsdoiel/antennaApp
cd antennaApp
make
make test
make install