idea: add rss feeds to our slacks

[drmowinckels]

We are getting so many awesome feeds through this repo, and in both the organiser slack and the community slack there are #rladiesblogs (variations on that spelling) where feeds from community member's blog come.

We should add the feeds from here to those slacks! We can either do that manually through the /feed command, or find some other nifty way of doing it.

[cosimameyer]

I love the idea! 💜 I remember that I also tried to add my blog with /feed but failed 😄 I think if we either add the existing blogs manually or find an automatic pipeline (even better), that would be fantastic!

[drmowinckels]

agree, something automatic would be great. Let explore that when we have the time. Likely the best option is to make some slack bot, but uncertain. I have colleagues who have made slack bots claiming it isnt too hard :P

[drmowinckels]

ok, so I made an action that is getting somewhere, but not finishing the job correctly.

https://github.com/rladies/awesome-rladies-blogs/blob/main/.github/workflows/slack-feed.yaml

It takes an url as an input (so we can trigger it for instance after merge to main), and it posts a message to the slack channel /feed url . Problem is, Slack is not recognising it as a command, just as a message, and so the feed is not added.

I've been looking for a "command" webapi endpoint from slack, but cant seem to find it. But we have something to base ourselves off of.

[cosimameyer]

That looks cool, thanks so much for the headstart! I also looked into it yesterday and found this - I’m not sure whether sending slash commands as a bot still works (SO says "no" but I’m hoping for a customized workaround 😄)

It looks like /feed is maintained/developed by Slack - I’ll reach out and ask them about a public API endpoint.

[drmowinckels]

Yeah, I have been poking around for answers, and there is an undocumented webapi command chat.command that used to work. It technically still works, but you'll need a legacy token, which we cannot get a hold of :/

[cosimameyer]

I know :( I got a reply and sent it to you on Slack - it's not really helpful but probably you can access one of the links? (most likely the second one)

[cosimameyer]

I didn't fully evaluate them but I kept looking for a solution and wanted to leave my "finds" here to not forget about them:

• imitate the behavior of the RSS app (not sure how much work this eventually will be)
• use a specific user’s token (not directly what they say but what I thought of; I think it doesn't work because it still uses the endpoints programmatically but I'm wondering if there are permission differences when it comes to users vs bots)
• attempt of serializing and deserializing input to define the type of output

I also checked these repositories:

• undocumented commands in Slack API
• Python SDK; but there are of course also others :)

The more I read, the less I think we’ll find a solution in the links above - but I'm staying optimistic 😊