Just learned that Steve Yegge has changed blogging platforms again. He’s now writing on his own site. Sadly no RSS, but I also learnt that XCancel allows subscription via RSS to someone’s Twitter feed (HT @sod). So, doing the best I can under these less than ideal circumstances.

Follow up

Apparently that’s not enough. Inkwell is being blocked by XCancel, so this won’t work. Ah well.

@lmika Ah, bummer. I know the Nitter instances have had a lot of problems with bot traffic, so they try their best to lock it down. I’m on Tapestry and NetNewsWire, where the RSS feeds work. @manton would need to reach out to the Nitter project and ask them to add Inkwell to the list of accepted user agents. Or, you know, be a little tricky and use a working user agent string for requests going out to Nitter instances. 😈

@sod Yeah, I did consider playing with the user agent strings for a hot minute. 🥸 But more than happy to wait for official support, should it come.

@sod @lmika If it works in NetNewsWire, I’d love to get it to work with Inkwell too, avoiding user-agent tricks… Probably because Inkwell’s requests all come from just a few IP addresses, they’re flagging it as suspicious or requesting too often.

@manton They might use tricks like IP address limiting too, but I think they have a user agent allow list as well. Fetching an RSS feed with curl from the terminal won’t work, for example, unless you add NetNewsWire’s user agent to the request.

@sod Good to know, thanks. I’ll try to reach out to them.

@manton In Feedland it shows a message explaining how to get whitelisted. Inkwell doesn’t seem to show that but there’s a unique identifier to send them via email to get unblocked.

@manton Thanks for looking into this. It would be good to get it working with Inkwell.