Install RSS feed aggregator on kabanero.io

[bschrammIBM]

Feature description

Need an RSS feed aggregator on kabanero.io so the we can syndicate blogs from RSS feeds such as https://medium.com/appsody and https://knative.dev/blog/ , (others)

Feature design or visual mockup

There is a large selection of GNU licensed aggregators. For example, http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/
Planet Venus is an awesome ‘river of news’ feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first.

Additional context

Syndication will increase blog readership and make it easy to find the appsody tutorials and other open source blogs.

[GkhnYlmz]

Hello Team,
I want to make contribution for this task.
Can you assign me also and communicate with each other?
Thanks.
Gokhan

[alohr51]

Hi @GkhnYlmz thanks for the interest! Let's talk here about how you want to go about this. What kind of ideas do you see in the finished product?

@bschrammIBM maybe you can help with what you expect too, we already have a "feed" on https://kabanero.io/blog/ and having 2 separate feeds might be confusing to a user.

What we can do is post third party blogs on /blog page like we already did for the "Introduction to Appsody" blog. That wouldn't require any code change for the website and is a manual process for the blog repository.

[bschrammIBM]

Hi, do the re-posted blogs update automatically? (meaning when a new blog is posted for appsody on https://medium.com/appsody, is it automatically available on kabanero.io/blogs?)
The idea for an RSS feed is that we can provide a seamless experience for people when reading the various blogs. We can syndicate from medium easily, and potentially other open source blogs as well. Attached is a proposal that covers both kabanero.io and developer.ibm.com(which is under discussion with that team).
blog_syndication_proposal_CP4Apps.pptx

[bschrammIBM]

@alohr51 Can you clarify "we already have a "feed" on https://kabanero.io/blog/ and having 2 separate feeds might be confusing to a user." Do you mean that https://kabanero.io/blog/ is an RSS feed? That allows the blog to be aggregated by other sites. What I am proposing is that kabanero.io/blog will aggregate other feeds, such as medium/appsody and any other blogs we want.

[alohr51]

@bschrammIBM the /blogs section is correlated to the blogs repo so they are manual additions when we add them to the repo.

We can pull in other blogs via RSS (appsody for example) but they would be mostly blogs about the specific pieces of Kabanero instead of blogs about how those pieces fit into Kabanero, which can be confusing since you're on the Kabanero website.

[bschrammIBM]

Well let's discuss. I think the Appsoday, tekton and knative blogs would be appropriate for the kabanero website. Definitely appsody. There are too many locations for blogs from which to get info. We need to consolidate the content. We can filter them so they are only appropriate entries. Manual updates is not extensible going forward. It will help build community.

[alohr51]

We decided not to follow up on adding blogs from other sources since most do not mention Kabanero. it would be confusing to go from Kabanero website to a blog that doesn't mention Kabanero (even if the tool is a part of Kabanero)

If there is a good blog post we can add a direct link to it on our blogs page, see intro to appsody example redirect in our blog repo

[bschrammIBM]

@alohr51 I discussed this with Garth, Nate, and Diana. They want to explore the syndication proposal further. Please re-open this issue and we will add it to an Epic.

[bschrammIBM]

blog_syndication_proposal_Kabanero.pptx

[alohr51]

I still think that we shouldn't do this for the following reasons:

1. It doesn't really solve the problem its trying to solve

   • There will still be x number of blogs out there, we're just making the problem worse by copying them to kabanero.io

2. The blogs that we pull in from others (Tekton, Appsody, etc...) don't write their blogs in context of Kabanero so the content will be confusing to readers - why does Kabanero.io have blog posts about tools that don't mention Kabanero? or how the tool fits into Kabanero? We also can't force other blogs to write them in context of Kabanero (they are their own open source projects)

3. If someone wants to read a blog post on Tekton, why would they come to Kabanero.io? They would go to Tekton's blog. Our blogs should be Kabanero specific and focused. We will mention those other tools, but we need to do it within the context of Kabanero - how those tools fit into the big picture and flow of a Kabanero experience.

[nateziemann]

We need to be better bring in more content but we also need to be selective in what we promote on the Kabanero.io site. Adding a blogs automatically that promote separate things and possibly the opposite position we are providing with Kabanero (meaning ICPA in open source), that makes us look bad. For example, Tekton may create a blog on how to do something, where Kabanero doesn't allow or takes a different approach. example "Here's how you install Tekton on Kube". We install Tekton on Kube, we'd never promote or encourage someone to do it themselves. "How you use Appsody stacks to deploy directly to any Kubernetes". We'd never promote that as we promote deploying to OpenShift through a pipeline in a controlled way. "Here is how developers can create webhooks in the Tekton dashboard (we never want a developer creating a webhook in our workflow).

What we need is a way to select and de-select articles coming from multiple feeds / sources.

[alohr51]

So we already have a manual process to cherry pick in blogs we want, for example see "Introduction to Appsody" on https://kabanero.io/blog/ - so we can pull in blogs we want using that process (Open a PR in the blogs repo with a link to the blog post)

The question is whether we want to invest time in using RSS to automate pulling in blogs from many different sources. It would be tough to automate which blogs get pulled in without someone actually reading it.

[nateziemann]

I think what Barbara is bringing up is the fact we need a lot of content flowing through the blog. And doing so by pulling in from many places is important. I just want a way to hide or remove content when we see it confuses or negatively represents our positioning.

[alohr51]

So we can automate by pulling in blogs from whatever sources we want and even filter blogs by keywords (but what would those magical keywords be?)

Also, if we do use RSS and automate this and a blog pops up that we don't want to show, it will be live on our site until someone reviews it and says "hey get this off" then we're going to have to go and add another filter and republish the entire website. This can happen many, many times over time and be a nuisance.

Using the current way of adding a blog post to the blogs repo in GitHub (allows for review) is a safer (yet more manual way) of adding blog posts from other sources.

[ralanlittle]

I personally do NOT want to syndicate and unfiltered appsody blog on to the Kabanero site. We are not promoting appsody on the site, we are promoting Kabanero. And the messages are not the same.

[ralanlittle]

An automated process puts the wrong stuff in the stream. Appsody is not 100% the same as Kabanero, in fact, it is creating confusion with our customers. We should not be including those Blogs without a pass-through to ensure that things are in line with Kabanero