0xDECAFBAD - Tag: newsriver

Don't Pee in the Potato Chips

2006-01-28T07:02:15+00:00

So, I've expressed some renewed interest in tinkering around with the code behind the OPML Editor and NewsRiver. Well, it needs to be said that there are some strings attached to playing in this field: That is, these are Dave Winer's potato chips I'm enjoying.

And, well, when you're taking chips from another another guy's lunchpail, it's customary to at least be nice to the guy and be gracious about the sharing. Granted, when I'm done, there could end up being more potato chips left in the bag than when I found it—that's the nature of this sort of sharing, after all. But the bag, nonetheless, was brought to the table by Dave.

Although I've tried to bow out of it over the past few years, I have historically been found amongst the crowd who've been known to take pokes at Dave when it affords a run of chuckles or guffaws. Sometimes, this has been in the pursuit of making a technical point or two in dramatic fashion—but often this has just been done toward the goals of playground-level politics and tit-for-tat.

Well, this crap doesn't suit me. Or at least, I don't want to be suited for it. You see, I really just care about being friendly, working on decent code—and besides, my Winer Number is right around Mu.

Although I've been witness to many clashes of ego involving the man with others of strong ego, I've never actually been the personal victim of any slight from Mr. Winer that I care to count or remember. It's been fashionable to poke at him, but my goal is to keep my ego at a calm distance from most things in life and I've not got any personal gripes with Dave Winer.

On the contrary, when I look at my career over the last few years, I see plain evidence that I've benefitted well from the man's influence—even if indirectly from his work. I've successfully profited from implementations of XML-RPC and RSS. I've managed to write my first book thanks to things I first picked up from him. And, I've learned a lot in pursuing fractional horsepower HTTP servers.

Dave writes shitty software and evangelizes shitty ideas. And, since the turn of the century or so, I've adopted and improvised upon many of them for fun and profit. Thus, while I don't want to be on any "side" or in any "camp" or be a mindless fan or follower of anyone or anything—I do feel a need to at least be nice to Dave Winer while I'm sharing his potato chips.

So, Dave? I'm sorry I've pissed in the bag of chips a few times. Maybe we can just call those salt and vinegar and let someone else eat 'em. In the meantime, I might make a run to the party store for some dip or something.

Archived Comments

Brad Neuberg
2006-01-30T10:54:25

Do you have a online demo for the OPML Editor you mentioned ?

A bit of newsRiver hackery

2006-01-21T06:54:30+00:00

Update: I moved this code over to my space over at hosting.opml.org and added some updater code from Nicholas Riley's webdav tool, so that you should be able to just "Get Latest Code..." once you've got this installed. (Or reinstalled, if you grabbed last night's version.) Also, I fixed a bug or two.

So, I couldn't resist poking around with Dave Winer's newsRiver in the OPML editor. For whomever's interested in this sort of thing, here's the result of a couple of hours' hacking this evening:

decafbadNewsRiver.root

In this is a tool to be dropped into your OPML Editor install's Guest Databases / apps / Tools directory, right alongside newsRiver.root itself. You may need to restart the OPML Editor. Once installed, you should see a new "DecafbadNewsRiver" menu item under the Tools menu, allowing you to view your news in this new UI. Expect lots of bugs, though.

Basically, this provides an alternate DHTML outline rendering of the news items gathered by newsRiver—quite similar to what I did back in October for FeedSpool. I'm not sure how far I'll take this, if I take it any farther. I've got a bit of a notion to tackle some REST/AJAX interaction with newsRiver for on-the-spot item deletion, and maybe on-demand item content retrieval.

But, for newsRiver hackers: You might like what I've done with the viewNewsItems script under decafbadNewsRiverSuite. I've made an attempt to pull all of the HTML out of the midst of the processing code. That's was icky, and I hated it back when I first ran into it in Radio UserLand.

I've broken all of that out into smaller external templates for page, feed, and item under decafbadNewsRiverData. This should allow for easier styling and customization of the code that newsRiver produces, as well as maybe swapping themes on the fly with a preference that points the rendering process at a different root table for templates.

In any case, do what you like with this work. I hope it's useful to someone out there.

Archived Comments

Donovan Watts
2006-01-21T07:55:24

neat! i much prefer this interface. thanks much.

Use del.icio.us to build & share Reading Lists?

2006-01-19T20:08:37+00:00

As far as I know, the most popular link managment tool is del.icio.us, a tool I love for its power and simplicity. del.icio.us allow you to export all your links in RSS which is cool. So, I wrote a quick and dirty PHP script that converts this RSS export to an OPML list (see at the end of this post).

Source: vrypan|net|log » del.icio.us as feed manager

I haven't had much chance to dig into Dave Winer's new newsRiver tool for the OPML Editor, but I've at least installed it and nodded at it. It's not much more than the aggregator I used to use in Radio—but the big difference is the promise of fresh new development.

And yeah, I know, I groused about OPML versus XOXO not more than a few months ago. But, although I still would prefer cool things being done in XOXO, Reading Lists (in OPML) would appear to be one way to get the stratified River of News that I'm looking for. That is, a Reading List can be a news strata in an aggregator.

But, beyond my prioritized folders in NetNewsWire, a Reading List in OPML can be serialized and shared and subscribed. Yeah, aggregators can already import and export OPML subscription lists—but I've never seen this feature automated by subscription until now. This is the difference between an MP3 download and a podcast.

And, if you check out the above-quoted blog post, these could even be collaboratively maintained by way of del.icio.us and a simple RSS-to-OPML gateway service. I've got to say, this could be one of the niftiest bits of mojo to hit syndication and aggregation tech in awhile.