RasterWeb!

One more Feed on Feeds hack before I’m outta here…

Below is what you would normally see. Well, ok what I would normally see when using Feed on Feeds:

My last modification was to make the feeds with unread items bold, and put how many unread items after the name. (This is how Bloglines does it.) Notice the addition of a link titled ‘show unread’ at the top.)

The new way, after clicking on that ‘show unread’ link:

Clicking on the ‘show unread’ link reloads the list with just the feeds with unread items, hiding those that are already read. This might be handy for people who are subscribed to a zillion feeds.

What I’m really liking about Feed on Feeds is the hackability, even though I’m no PHP expert. (Imaging if I did know PHP!) Bloglines is still very nice, and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t get that hacking itch, but for those of us who always need to tweak things along the way, Feed on Feeds is great.

Ok, I warned you I was going to hack at FEED ON FEEDS a bit, and I did, just a little bit…

My main goal was to make it function a little bit more like Bloglines, and so far we’ve got this. (Click for full size versions.)

(Example of Bloglines list of subscribed feeds)

(Example of hacked FEED ON FEEDS list of subscribed feeds)

So they’re starting to look similar, but I’ve also got some of the functionality replicated as well. For instance, in my hacked FEED ON FEEDS just loading a feed’s items marks that feed as ‘read’ – there is no manual marking needed, no checkboxes to check, or links to click. I like it this way and became accustomed to it in Bloglines, so I had to have it here.

I don’t know how much farther I’ll take things, but I might hack at little bits of it here and there if I get motivated, or you know, actually get involved in the development, though the fear of commitment to yet another project makes me not want to get into things too deep…

Mr. Genehack suggested I look at FEED ON FEEDS as a "Super-Happy-Terrific Aggregator", and while I have used it before, it’s gone through a number of updates since then. Perhaps enough for me to hack at it a bit and see if it’ll do what I want.

Phil suggests using Mark’s Universal Feed Parser, which is what I too would want to see happen, as I’ve mentioned before… Even if it’s an optional thing, where you could choose to use the Universal Feed Parser or FEED ON FEEDS mechanism, it would be cool.

As for the UI of FEED ON FEEDS, the framed version is nice, but I’d like to see it look a little cleaner, perhaps similar to Bloglines. In fact, I’d like to see some of the functionality mirror what Bloglines does, where just viewing a feed marks it as read, without having to explicitly click things. It looks like the tables in MySQL could use a few more columns. Items are marked with a timestamp that appears to denote when it was downloaded, not the actual time of the entry. RSS 2.0 has pubDate, and Atom 0.3 has issued, modified and (possibly) created, on a per-item level, can’t these be used instead?

Since FEED ON FEEDS is open-source, and released under the GPL I could certainly hack some of these changes into it. The only thing stopping me is my lack of time, and my lack of PHP skills… In other words, I’ll start hacking on it very soon…