One request while I was missing for two weeks and not the first time I have received it was for me to finally provide RSS, thank-you. Here I will work on providing that in ansi common lisp for this blog.

> Video livestream demo of the code and topics in this article https://toobnix.org/w/evepEXh69p6YaWYsPe6rLs

> Writing time conversions kind of dragged on, though it is interesting too in Naggum's long painful history kind of way. I will extract the substance of this article into some focused and useable articles next week. This one is more of a history of me figuring it out.

> I mention Naggum a few times since someone remembered his article to me while I was writing time stuff. If you do not know who Naggum is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum he was an infamous Swedish lisp programmer usenet poster.

> NOTE I hate advertisers, so I am going to use https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/examples/rss2sample.xml as my reference for rss.
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc822.html#section-5 is the (modified) time specification RSS uses due to Crocker in 1982.

RSS is an open standard for individual people to get new articles from individual websites, basically. The gist is that the individual's RSS-reader program checks an XML file served by a website (`/index.xml`?) which has a list of the website's articles. If the list has changed, the RSS-reader program downloads the new or changed articles for the person to read.

You can find out more about RSS from my friend MattoF: https://box.matto.nl/why-rss-is-important.html . [Gonzalo Nemmi](https://mastodon.sdf.org/@gnemmi) also had a link that the excuse for removing RSS was that XML is too old to use, debunked here: https://www.process-one.net/blog/stop-telling-us-xmpp-should-use-json/ . The gist is that XML is suitable for streaming through a file, not loading a whole dictionary structure into memory.

Albeit my blog index is currently generated from an `Articles.json` file. I guess I will load that with `cl-json`, and then write an `index.xml` RSS file using [`xhtmlambda`](https://xhtmlambda.common-lisp.dev/). In this initial push I had to recover article gates from git which took up some space too.

I should mention Hajovonta has a json querying package [`cl-jsonpath`](https://sr.ht/~hajovonta/cl-jsonpath/), though the json I used here is small and uncomplicated.

It used to be that big companies offered RSS feeds from their users, but all the companies dumped it since it meant users could choose specific articles to get and did not have to interface with the company's web applications (advertising and user data scraping). Similar to the XMPP story (did you know that around 2000 you used to be able to have friends who used different online chat service providers? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, whatever all just offered the open standard XMPP (which they also got for free), and you could chat to people everywhere. Obviously, they all 3e'd their own chat services like they dropped support for RSS).