LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators"

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

roelofs — 2006-04-04T05:28:27+00:00

Mailx (aka nail) is da one and only!

Amen! "My mail client is old enough to drink."

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

sitaram — 2006-03-31T08:58:43+00:00

I have been using Thunderbird for a while now, my logic being that even if I am away from my desk for a week or more, I want to see every single item that I missed. Needless to say, I keep Thunderbird on all the time. I subscribe only to a few but important, high-quality feeds, and I don't want to miss anything.

Do the other readers have this feature? Wouldn't you miss articles if you went away for a few days if you used them? Or do they cache locally like an email client? I really don't know...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

mightyduck — 2006-03-30T19:16:06+00:00

You forgot the original TECO emacs!

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

mightyduck — 2006-03-30T19:09:27+00:00

Mailx (aka nail) is da one and only!

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

lysse — 2006-03-30T18:17:54+00:00

Great review (and Sage is something I need to investigate) - but I remember using newsgroups as a way of both keeping up with news and participating in wide-ranging conversations where I could see updates as soon as they happened. And that was 15 years ago.

Suddenly I feel very like Alice...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

aigarius — 2006-03-30T17:10:12+00:00

Well I do use rss2email + a GMail account for my RSS reading needs. It is all here:

http://www.aigarius.com/2006/01/01/

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

RobSeace — 2006-03-30T16:07:13+00:00

You think YOU'VE got it bad? I still use elm! ;-)

snownews: text-based rss reader

bkw1a — 2006-03-30T13:57:20+00:00

If you prefer a text interface, you might take
a look at "snownews":

http://kiza.kcore.de/software/snownews/

Both Konqi and Firefox...

hummassa — 2006-03-30T11:54:12+00:00

show an orange (((*))) icon near the bottom-right corner of the window
when a site has an RSS/Atom feed: click on it!!!

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

sstein — 2006-03-30T10:55:41+00:00

I was using akregator and Firefox's Sage for some time now. However, I have a dual boot setup with Windows on the other side, so akregator is not a real solution. In addition I also read many rss sites at work and there we also only have Windows.

The main problem however is to synchronise the different clients. Therefore I moved on to web-based tools like Google reader. Now I can browse the same collection of feeds from all my different computer accounts and systems.

Even though I understand that you focus your review on Linux based applications, I guess in the future we will see a move to web-based tools. This might need 2 or 3 more years, but in the end I guess it is a much better solution.

Sebastian

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

jmm — 2006-03-30T10:39:18+00:00

Akregator is only fast for small feeds, for feeds with lots of entries (like BoingBoing) it is painfully slow, as it reparses the whole XML way too often. And it has the annoying misfeature, that one cannot select more than one message (e.g. to delete something).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

xoddam — 2006-03-30T03:55:51+00:00

> like a review of text editors that limits itself to ones with a
> GUI, you might just leave something important out.

Indeed! ed, ex and CP/M's EDLIN were crucially important in their day.
</sarcasm>.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

smitty_one_each — 2006-03-30T02:05:51+00:00

Ah, yes, I skimmed at too high a level.
However, my second sentence stands as a useful point; I should at least like to keep the subscription list constant across multiple clients.

OT

guinan — 2006-03-29T20:24:29+00:00

I don't mind sharing, but are you writing in C, Python, other?

Do you know ahead of time how many bytes you want to receive?

If the length is embedded in the data stream, you might as well recv() as much as you can, to avoid extra system calls. But if there's another message behind the first one, you might end up reading into that, in which case you should keep ahold of the "remainder" for the next call.

Email me guinan@bluebutton.com if you want to take it offline.

What about a simple RSS server?

madscientist — 2006-03-29T18:17:08+00:00

That's much more like it. Thanks!

What about a simple RSS server?

bronson — 2006-03-29T14:44:46+00:00

That almost never works... If a project bores you, chances are it will also bore someone who has even less loyalty to the code. Projects with similar histories are littered across SourceForge... If you shepherd your project long enough to attract some loyal users, however, you might manage to do it. it takes some dilligence though!

netvibes

bronson — 2006-03-29T14:33:18+00:00

I disagree. Even with my 3 MB/sec cable link, page refresh latency is rather large. I can crank thorugh 200 feeds much faster using a local app using locally cached data. This is especially true when the feeds include enclosures.

And, make sure to save those OPML files! There are tons of startup feed reading sites competing for very little revenue. A number of them will disappear without warning in the next few years.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

arafel — 2006-03-29T13:34:11+00:00

Check the third paragraph. ;-)

What about a simple RSS server?

sjlyall — 2006-03-29T13:05:03+00:00

This might be what you are after:

http://programming.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/18/1416203&tid=63&tid=47

OT

tjc — 2006-03-29T02:54:00+00:00

I think maybe you want to change your HTTP request to use "Connection: close" instead.

That didn't seem to help. Thanks or the suggestion though; I will keep playing with it. It's probably a combination of things.

What about a simple RSS server?

tjc — 2006-03-29T02:34:55+00:00

I re-read your post, and you're right, this isn't what you're looking for.

This is an server program that takes an RSS feed as input and converts the output to HTML. I was going to use it for news updates on a webpage, but that project fell through, so this code has been languishing on my hard drive for a while now. Lately I've been think about finishing it just so that the work I put into it doesn't go to waste. I was hoping to push it off on someone else. :-)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

barbara — 2006-03-29T00:59:58+00:00

Glad to see another Pine user. :-) I usually get negative comments when
I mention that Pine is my mailer of choice.

Alan Cox's Portaloo: off topic, but somewhat related

nicku — 2006-03-29T00:49:18+00:00

Possibly useful, though not a standalone utility with graphical interface, is Alan Cox's long standing (since 1999) Portaloo. However, I don't see the source for it any more.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

allesfresser — 2006-03-29T00:34:57+00:00

Speaking as a Pine user, I would heartily think not.

What about a simple RSS server?

madscientist — 2006-03-28T22:48:12+00:00

There're no docs and few comments, but as far as I can tell from the code this doesn't seem to be related to what I was asking about. Apropos of not much, if I were going to do something like this I'd write it in Perl (or Python or Ruby or whatever) rather than C, at least until/unless they were proven too inefficient... good luck with your project though!

OT

lutchann — 2006-03-28T22:25:57+00:00

I took a look at your code since you posted it below; I think maybe you want to change your HTTP request to use "Connection: close" instead.

OT

lutchann — 2006-03-28T22:21:55+00:00

Well, do you want recv() to return the contents of the socket receive buffer and then return immediately, or do you want it to wait until it has enough received data to fill your entire buffer? Is there some other behavior you're looking for? I'm not sure what that would be...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

nedrichards — 2006-03-28T22:16:45+00:00

or reBlog http://reblog.org/ for that matter. GPL and rather tasty, with it's Ajax keyboard goodness. Derived from Feedonfeeds mentioned below.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

ewan — 2006-03-28T22:02:50+00:00

Speaking as a Mutt user, I'm pretty sure it would be :-)

What about a simple RSS server?

tjc — 2006-03-28T21:28:01+00:00

Anyone have any pointers to something very small and simple? It doesn't have to be "production ready" or anything.

You can use this, if you can get it to work right!

http://www.visi.com/~m42/katie/

Right now there are issues with recv(), as noted in a post above.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

nix — 2006-03-28T21:17:11+00:00

Gnus supports converting RSS feeds into virtual newsgroups, just as it allows converting mail, digests, google output and just about everything else you can imagine into virtual newsgroups :)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

nix — 2006-03-28T21:15:40+00:00

Speaking as a Gnus user, no ;)

OT

tjc — 2006-03-28T21:10:31+00:00

You have to keep track of the number of bytes returned and make multiple attempts. [snip] I usually write a wrapper function around recv() to keep the calling code simple.

Thanks for the reply. Would you mind sharing this wrapper function? It would save me some debugging time.

What about a simple RSS server?

madscientist — 2006-03-28T21:03:07+00:00

I've spent the last week poking around looking for a very simple RSS server (have you ever tried searching for something like that with Google etc.? :-))

By that I mean a CGI script or similar that lets people write up a short simple article or announcement and submit it to an RSS server, that would then publish it via RSS. I've looked at blogging engines, most of which publish RSS, and those are kind of what I mean but they're so heavy-weight; I don't need comments, calendars, etc. Plus I'd like to be able to timeout stuff and delete it. Also, I don't want people to have to learn HTML etc. to write content: I would like some pretty simple markup to do simple things: in that sense it's like a Wiki, but I don't want people to be able to modify the content, etc. (and most wikis are also more than I imagine I need).

Anyone have any pointers to something very small and simple? It doesn't have to be "production ready" or anything.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

lovelace — 2006-03-28T20:15:41+00:00

How about Mozilla Thunderbird? It supports both RSS and Atom directly in the mail reader and works quite well. Whether you like it integrated with a mail client is probably up to personal taste, but some people do.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

rfunk — 2006-03-28T20:12:04+00:00

Yes, in this respect Akregator+Konqueror has a feed-add mechanism quite
similar to Firefox+Sage.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

rfunk — 2006-03-28T20:07:59+00:00

Wouldn't it be better just to point to the Mutt manual?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

vputz — 2006-03-28T19:48:48+00:00

Another approach--and the one I personally love, since I use a few different desktops--is a home server and Feed on Feeds, a server-side RSS aggregator using PHP and MySQL. I can check it from home or work or a friend's house or via my handheld and wireless... really very handy!

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

joey — 2006-03-28T19:23:08+00:00

I can understand limiting the focus to graphical clients, but, like a review of text editors that limits itself to ones with a GUI, you might just leave something important out. IMHO that is rss2email. The concept is simple, gating RSS to email, where it can be filtered, sorted etc and read with your favorite mail reader (even a GUI mail reader if you like). This works really well.

Based on my experience maintaining it for Debian, it's quite popular in certian sets, so it's a pity it was left out.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to RSS aggregators

corey_s — 2006-03-28T19:14:46+00:00

akregator - being a kde app - has _excellent_ built-in customizable
keyboard shortcuts.

All the things you mention, plus much more, is available for configuration
based on your own preferences in the Settings -> Configure Shortcuts menu.