Tag Archives: rss

RSS quilt type thing

Posted on by

Ages ago I was trying to find a cool start page which I could set for my homepage; I’d grown bored of Reader because it stopped me going to other websites. I stuck with /r/funny for a while before switching to the Onion. Ultimately they weren’t giving me what I wanted, so I decided to make my own.

So I made this RSS quilt type thing, and it’s pretty perfect for me at the moment. By default it uses data from the combined RSS feeds of Reddit, BBC, the Guardian, and Ars so it’s a pretty nice pool of information for me. It only shows the headlines too, and that’s all wanted. Putting the body of the articles on would take up way too much space.

Dark items are newer items, whilst lighter items are older. Eventually they get so old they’re barely visible – but you can mouse over them to see it clearly again. Not that I’d want to, if it’s that old I’ve probably already read it. It checks for updates to the feeds every four minutes too, and then inserts them nicely into the page (in an element that you can see, so it’s not inserting elements at the bottom of the page where you won’t notice). It adds new elements in italics too, just to make them extra prominent.

Article order is always randomised

You can change the feed by clicking the modulo symbol in the navigation bar. You’ve got to put the actual RSS feed URL into that though. You can also nab the bookmarklette (click the question mark in the navigation bar) and that will hopefully find the RSS feed for the website you’re looking at when you click it.

Using it in full screen mode is cool. 100% filled with information, pretty much.

Not quite finished yet though, still a couple extra things I want to add: some option (without adding more text to the page) to say “I’m tired of seeing this story, get rid of it” and have that data locally stored in the browser. If the article is a picture post, or at least has a prominent picture in it, then show the picture rather than the headline. Add options to change the gradient from black to lighter to other colours. Dynamically insert an entire new feed (this shouldn’t be that hard, just need to rejig some logic around).

–FeedDemon

Posted on by

I actually really don’t like FeedDemon. They’ve clearly tried to act like Google Reader in a lot of ways (or maybe Reader decided to be like them when they started) but Google does everything much better. Which annoys me.

I was really look forwards to venturing out beyond Google’s services and trying others but Google’s monopoly on awesome is held really tightly for some reason.

I didn’t like FeedDemon because:

  • It doesn’t mark items as read after I’ve been looked at the item. After the item has been selected it should immediately become read, keeping an item as unread isn’t the default action that I’d want.
  • Control + D to go to the next unread item. I’m sure you can change that, but by default that’s a dumb idea. What’s wrong with J (which works in some cases, but not others)? I typical action such as going to the next item shouldn’t require a combination key press. I know this sounds lazy, but I have to move my hand to press control, and that annoys me.
  • It seems to be using Internet Explorer in the reading pane. Not so much of a big deal, but wha’?

I really do like the syncing with Google though. I know I wanted to get away from Google to start with, but it’s more about working in the cloud than fanboyism. I like all my stuff being synced. My laptop should really just be  a throw away device.

I also liked the monospaced, large reading area though. But for now I’ll just give Reader a quick CSS hack to do that.

Start and home pages

Posted on by

For the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader as my homepage, since I go there every few hours really frequently. Today though, I’ve decided that I want to change the way I use RSS feeds. Instead of just lumping together all the things I want to read in Google Reader, and then being overwhelmed when there’s a few hundred things  a day, I just want to keep Reader for infrequently updated feeds. More a feed reader (web comics, forum threads I want to keep track of, WordPress trac posts I want to keep track of) than a content reader (TechCrunch, Valleywag, Mashable). For content, I can go to their websites.

I’ve also decided to try out FeedDemon.

That leaves my homepage empty now, and I’ve been thinking of sites to replace Reader. I figured start.io might be a good idea before realising that my bookmarks do that job in a much more organised and quicker way. I actually really don’t like iGoogle, and I’m not sure why. I have a perfectly good search bar with more functionality right up top of my browser.

BBC News is pretty depressing most of the time. I like to be caught up on the news, but death, war, and economic failure isn’t really the pick me up I want to see first thing in the morning. Maybe I’ll go with /r/funny. That’d be new content each time I go there, and it’d make me happy. I’ll go with that for a while.