Slixfeed News Bot

Source

Original site

Greetings to one and all and welcome to the official news resource of Slixfeed!

I am delighted to make this initial public announcement of Slixfeed.

Slixfeed is a news aggregation software which currently functions only as a chat bot and is primarily intended for the XMPP network.

Slixfeed is still in testing phases and is not yet ready for production, albeit it performs well.

Slixfeed has not yet been audited for security!

Design

Slixfeed utilizes Slixmpp to communicate with the XMPP network, and feedparser to parse syndication feeds.

The fashion by which Slixfeed is designed is to serve multiple people at the same time.

The purpose of Slixfeed is to be able to simultaneously serve hundreds and even thousands of people from a single instance, which would make anyone a news publisher, if one so desires.

Features

Some features are exclusive to XMPP [1].

  1. Communicate with chats and groupchats;

  2. Display audio, picture and video attachments inline;

  3. Export and import feeds using standard OPML file;

  4. Filter news items by "allow" and "deny" rules;

  5. Publish items to PubSub nodes [2];

  6. Redirect to proxy back-ends [3];

  7. Rich and interactive visual interface using Ad-Hoc Commands;

  8. Scan automatically for syndication feeds of given URL;

  9. Schedule update cycle and send updates upon availability [4].

Interfaces

Slixfeed offers a couple of interfaces.

The premier interface is the chat, from which commands are sent and news are received.

The additional interface which makes use of Data Forms and Ad-Hoc Commands offers a visual interface to control and interact with Slixfeed.

The visual interface is currently best accessible with Cheogram and monocles chat; both are available free of charge on the F-Droid software repository.

Other XMPP clients which support the visual interface are Converse, Gajim, Movim, Poezio, Profanity, Psi and Psi+.

Preview

Screenshots of Cheogram and monocles chat interacting with Slixfeed [5].

monocles chat: Chat Interface monocles chat: Rich Interface Cheogram: Settings Form Cheogram: Subscription Form

Both, Ad-Hoc Command and Chat, interfaces are included.

Resources

  • For help, and support questions, please join our groupchat.

  • Source code is available at GitGud.

Conclusion

Slixfeed was made due to necessity and it has been intended to be hosted and utilized by as many people as possible.

Slixfeed was meant to be only a chat bot which sends only text, yet communications with edhelas, mirux, roughnecks, singpolyma and Thorsten have led this project to have an extensive set of features.

The Slixfeed project was started a year and eleven months ago, and its continuation and completion thereof were feasible thanks to Laura Lapina.

I would also want to thank to Simone "roughnecks" Canaletti for hosting the Slixfeed site, in addition to testing Slixfeed and instructing the current development of Slixfeed.

Consequent development news will be published soon.

I hope Slixfeed would be useful to you.

Kind regards,
Schimon