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After some advice from Frank (Osterfeld?) with regards to Akregator, I updated my system to KDE 3.5.2 yesterday to iron some problems I was having, atlhough I’ve been meaning to update KDE anyway. With Gregarius seemingly working quite happily, I was keen to now get a desktop reader working properly.

Upgrading to Akregator 1.2.2 seems to have made things easier to manage in terms of multiple selection + deletion, and I haven’t come across any problems with incorrect/duplicate/old items being delivered. I actually quite like Akregator sitting in the system tray quietly showing when new items are available.

Now it’s onto writing a plugin for Gregarius to handle the deletion of items the way I want it to. Already been spotted lurking in their IRC channel the last couple of days so figure I may as well do something about it Other than that, everything seems to be working perfectly. Will write up some quick instructions how to setup synchornisation between Gregarius and a desktop reader once I have some rough code for the plugin working.

After catching the attention of Marco Bonetti, one of the Gregarius developers, I’ve been playing with Gregarius a little bit more over the last few days. Seems like the slow updating of feeds is a known issue, and it was suggested I moved to 0.5.4RC2 to see what kind of problems I ran into, which I was pretty keen to do in order to help them out. One of the nice things about open source projects like this - the developers genuinely care and want to help to improve their code.

So, after running it on my test server (Xen powered now, of course !), it seemed very polished for a release candidate. Some very nice new features such as built-in authentcation system for the admin area, a Wordpress-like dashboard after logging in, and some extra plugins to help tidy up the formatting + display. And of course, it seemed to help with the actual delivery of the feeds which was the most important part! So much so, it’s now live on my main webserver.

Although I was quite happy with the way Gregarius was now handling the RSS feeds in the web-based system, it still wasn’t delivering this to Thunderbird. After a bit of discussion, I’ve moved to a dedicated RSS reader to figure out whether Gregarius or Thunderbird was fault. Seems like Thunderbird was the one causing the problems, as having ran Akregator for most of the day it’s been flawless. I’m finding Akregator a bit clunky though - no ability to delete multiple items, prompts on deletion of *every* item with no way to turn it off, and doesn’t display full articles, mainly links elsewhere. As their site is down after getting hit with DoS attacks, I can’t get in and download a newer version, as what scraps I pull from the Google cache and Sourceforge bug reports seem to indicate these issues are now resolved.

Still, is looking a bit more promising Gregarius 0.5.4RC2 is handling feeds correctly, on time, and without duplications or loading old items. It’s creating + delivering the RSS feeds properly, and I’ve at least found that a decent RSS reader will handle them correctly. Am looking over the Gregarius code to see if I can develop a plugin now to allow easy deletion of all read items from the web-based system to make it easy to clear items before having them loaded into an offline reader at home. Definately going to more action with this over the next few days!

It’s been a few days of running Gregarius and although I had quite high hopes, the integration with Thunderbird just hasn’t worked Looking at it from a web-based point of view, it’s worked quite well after a few tweaks documented earlier, but it’s just not quite generating the RSS feeds correctly.

Deleting the items from Gregarius often doesn’t remove the items from the feed delivered to Thunderbird, and there’s often a 10-15 minute delay between new items appearing in the web-based version and being published in the RSS feeds. I would expect that when Gregarius updates itself and realises new items are available, it would update it’s feeds at the same time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Still, at least it’s letting me keep track of my feeds online from work, and it’s only a couple of clicks to mark read items within Thunderbird. Would have been nice if Gregarius could deliver it’s own feeds a bit better, but it’s something I’ll keep an eye and look out for new versions to see if it’s updated. For those looking at a simple web-based system of keeping track of their own feeds and wanting to run it themselves rather than using an overly bloated online service, it’s worth a shot!

Means I’m still looking for ideas for synchronising Thunderbird with an online service it anyone has any ideas…

So far so good. After a couple of little niggly issues and adjusting a few settings, everything’s running very smoothly from the web-based side of things. Final test is of course going to be checking that Thunderbird correctly handles the feeds exported by Gregarius, but it all looks good at the moment

Am finding it quite slick by and large, though it wasn’t too happy pulling down a large number of feeds that had been made available overnight. I might look at setting up a cron job to update itself at 6a.m or so to pull down the bulk of the updated feeds, leaving only a handful of posts to be downloaded when I get into work. This is something well documented in the Gregarius wiki. Sometimes it does slow down processing data, but I think that’s more down to my server than anything else.

The minor changes I’ve made have included setting the front page to view only unread posts to prevent a long list of posts being displayed, and then altering the code that handles the ‘Mark this feed as read‘ button to actually delete the posts from the feed. I’ve still got the option to tag an item for saving it in order to allow Thunderbird to download it which is nice, though as with Thunderbird I prefer to delete posts once read unless they contain something useful.

It’s getting late and I’ve been out most of the evening, so haven’t had much of a chance to play with an idea that’s been in my head for a few days…

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the state of online feed readers, with TechCrunch doing a fairly comprehensive overview, and following it up in their latest podcast on TalkCrunch. I can’t quite get my head around those managing subscriptions to 200-300 blogs, that just seems like information overload and I don’t even know of that many blogs I’d be interested in, so Mozilla Thunderbird has served me well for a year or more now.

But, it would be nice to have some way to view all the same feeds via the web at work or wherever I find myself and have that synchronised back to Thunderbird when I get home. Go on, someone please name a web-based feed reader currently offers this. I couldn’t find any, only for Outlook/Outlook Express.

So, have had a quick play with Gregarius on my test server as is looking quite impressive. After exporting my OPML feed from Thunderbird and giving Gregarius a while to import them all, I now have a web-based system for managing and viewing all my feeds. The OPML import worked way better than expected, categorising all my feeds into the correct folders, and nicely displaying favicons where available. Doesn’t quite render the HTML as well as I would hope as it doesn’t read in any styling from the content provider, but that’s not really a problem at the moment. But, the nice features is being able to then access these feeds via RSS back into Thunderbird. Have tried it quickly with a couple of feeds and seems to work out the box - obviously Thunderbird won’t write back read message status to Gregarius, but any unread feeds from Gregarius are passed to Thunderbird for viewing. Thus, any feeds read via the web are not displayed in Thunderbird when I get home. Am sure it would be easy to write a quick script that lets me then set the status on all feeds to mark messages as read when closing Thunderbird.

Am sure I’ll find when I get a chance to go over things tomorrow when I’m not falling asleep I’ll run into some problems, but looks perfect right now! Will also see how quickly it runs when going across the web rather than my local system, and what kind of update interval Gregarius works on for pulling in new feeds. One minor issue will be adding new feeds as would need to add to Gregarius, grab the RSS feed from there, and import into Thunderbird, but not so much of a problem since I don’t often play around with my subscriptions.

Will see what tomorrow brings