You can now rename feeds in Feedme.
I made a slight change to the indexer - if an item got updated I used to clear the list of accounts that have read that feed so that people will see the update. The thing is.. feeds are very unreliable in which fields they support, so I have to check if the title, link or body changed in order to know if it got updated. For some reason for many feeds the body keeps changing even though the content didn’t actually change. This is incredibly annoying because every 6 hours when feedme indexes again you get the same old items. So.. for now I just don’t clear that list anymore. If an item was marked as read, then it is marked as read forever. If it got updated before you read it, then you still get the latest updated version.
Otherwise.. I am really happy with it. I don’t actually want to add anything to it, really - I’m going to keep the minimalist nature. The only thing I now plan to add is a way to export your feeds to an OPML file. I decided not to support importing OPML files. After that I’m going to effectively consider this app done except for bugfixes and maybe a nicer homepage.
I finally installed seymour as Feed me! on a subdomain for now: feedme.opensores.za.net.
It is running on a 256MB slice.
TODO:
-
Sometimes feedfinder still doesn’t find feeds if you give it a URL that contains feeds, but isn’t a feed in itself. It is supposed to give you a nice error message at the very least..
-
I think there’s an issue with embedded things like youtube videos, but can’t remember the details. I’ll have to investigate.
-
You can’t rename feeds - it uses the title the feed specifies for everyone. For some reason not everyone’s feeds are well named..
-
Currently you can’t import/export OPML feeds - I plan to implement it shortly.
-
I still have to put the code up somewhere. Just figuring out how best to host a bzr repository.
Anything else.. please contact me.
I ended up writing a feed aggregator inspired by Newshutch. It just needs a tiny bit of polish before I’ll deploy it somewhere.
Here’s a sneak peak in the meantime:
It uses Django, Universal Feed Parser and feedfinder.
I plan to host it myself (under the name “Feed me!”), but it will be open source. The project is called “Seymour”.
I only found out last night that Newshutch shut down in October already. I used them for a while in 2006 to 2007 - it was a very well designed app. (see Beautiful interface: Newshutch on Signal vs Noise.)
I stopped using them because I just stopped tracking blogs in general - I realized that I fell into this routine of consuming information all day, wasting my time and generally not doing anything myself. I was just procrastinating and tracking blogs became a big part of the problem. So I stopped using Newshutch and I immediately got this surge of productivity ;)
Anyway.. they had some great ideas and it is a shame to see them go to waste. I had insomnia last night and for some reason decided that I should write an RSS aggregator myself just because the remaining options suck so badly. Decided to mock up some HTML and CSS for the interface and this is it:
(yes - that’s a random Tango icon for the moment. It should ideally be a cute little green monster or something)
The left column is fixed and the right one scales and takes up the remaining space. The idea with the footer is that it might contain other links and text.
I should have a release ready soon…
