Playing With Sharp Objects

I tried it by loading all 166 feeds from my OPML list and they were successfully imported. The interface looked beautiful and it seemed very responsive that first night. Fast forward a couple of days later and now all I get is “Loading…” for what is now over 15 mins. The reader is obviously loading more data than it needs to in order to show me that first page. That’s friggin unacceptable.

MonkeyChow is not as pretty but certainly faster. This past summer, after a week of vacation I came back and had thousands of articles to wade through, but the interface was as fast as a normal day of feed grazing. If you have access to a PHP/MySQL server, give it a spin. I’ll have to work on the UI since I really did fall in love with the new Google Reader colors. For now, I think the Google Reader team has some work to do.

Google has just announced the improved look and feel of Google Reader, which I reviewed almost a year ago.

The aggregated view is there now, labeled the River of News by some. I had such high hopes for Google Reader back when it was first released, but it was waaaaay tooo sllooooow. Now, this feels very usable and could even tempting me away from my own RSS reader project.

Still, it needs a few more features like searching for similar articles, or some sort of grouping of articles that are running the same meme (so I only have to read the same story once =) Needs a dinosaur feeds listing, too. Also needs some way of marking ranges of articles that have been read. MonkeyChow has a “Mark up to here” feature it inherited from Feed On Feeds which lets you check off a number of items as having been read without having to check off each one. This is pretty useful when you only want to mark off some articles in a list of 200 or so. However, something like what GMail offers would be even more useful. The reblogging feature is similar to what I have now, so they’ve provided a lot of what I already use, only they call it Sharing, which makes it sound more like a social networking thing. I would prefer some sort of sharing with circles of friends or groups.

All in all, it’s very pretty, and quite usable. I’ll best testing it over the next few days to see how I really feel about it.

[Download here]

(UPDATE: The above link has been updated to point to the latest download where I fixed a problem with pruning and to provide a workaround for those without gettext built into their PHP.)

Now that I’ve got a number of features all together, I’ve decided to do a full release to get all the new goodies out to those that don’t like pulling from SVN. This is the recent version 102 release from the Sourceforge SVN in a tar.gz for you to unpack in your web server. Note that there are a lot of changes in this, and I recommend that you install this in a new area. Typically SVN takes care of file deletions, but using the tar.gz will not clean up old files for you.

My goal for the 1.0 release is to further merge the frames and non-frames views into a single unified view, and to reorganize and pretty up the interface, possibly with some sort of skinning or basic styling. We’ll always have the current basic no-nonsense view, but some want something they feel they can show to their friends. I’ll continue to follow SimplePie as it grows in further releases and hopefully by 1.0 I’ll be using a non-beta version of SimplePie. I also hope that this new 0.5 release will spur more people to do translations so that 1.0 will have a number of languages supported. Somewhere in there I also need to add multiuser support and preferences for users. I can’t promise that 1.0 will be the next release, but this is what I’m thinking about for the future of MonkeyChow.

So what new features have been added in the 0.5 release since the previous 0.2 release? Here is a list of all the changes I’ve blogged about in the past three and a half months:

• Feed Expiration - For when you want to subscribe to something for just a short period.
• Feed Privacy - For when you want to subscribe to something, but yuo don’t want it appearing in the published list and its RSS feed, or the aggregator pages and its RSS feed, or the OPML output.
• Internationalization - MonkeyChow in your language
• Article collapsing and collapse toggling. Also set flags to toggle.
• Uses SimplePie
• Per Feed Article Aging

If there is something on your MonkeyChow wishlist that you’d like to see get into the next release, drop me a line or leave a comment here.

I’ve bumped Monkey Chow up to using the latest SimplePie beta 3. I’ll be following along with SimplePie as they update. At some point I’ll have to set things up so that I can use SimplePie’s SVN repository as an external SVN within my repository.

Also, a long-awaited item has been added: Per feed article aging. This means that the Article Aging field that has been in the edit page for all these months now will actually do something. This means that when you have a very busy feed like Digg to follow, you can set that feed to age articles out at a rate of your choice rather than the default 30 days. This can help keep the size of your database way down. Alternately, if there is a feed you want to keep around longer, bump up the number of days the articles are kept around.

This also means that I had to actually fix article aging which appears to have been broken for quite some time now, and was causing database sizes to grow without ever being pruned.

Check it all out in the latest SVN version 102.

With less than a week until the 5th anniversary of 9/11 Michelle Malkin has reported on the 2,996 Project. I’m number 2527 with a profile of Captain Thomas Theodore Haskell. Stop by to remember some of the victims of this terrible attack, and think about what it will take to prevent any such attack from happening in our lifetime or that of our grandchildren. Rather than focusing on the politics of the War on Terror for now, however, lets celebrate Captain Haskell.

Captain Haskell was battalion chief for Ladder Company 132 of the New York Fire Department in Brooklyn. I’ve always thought that being a member of a fire department was crazy work, running into buildings while everyone else was running out. Someone in that line of work knows that when they run into the building there is a real chance that they may be putting themselves into a situation that may end with their horrific death. But they do it anyway for you and I, people they don’t even know. There are people all over the U.S. doing this on a daily basis. I pass our local fire department every day on my way to work, where they have a sign asking for volunteers. I look at that sign and know that I’m not brave enough to do that line of work, just like I’m not brave enough to sign up for any military line of work. So I have a deep respect for this man who died while performing an honorable job during an unthinkable event that would have sent most of us cowering into a corner. Compounding his tragedy is the fact that the attack also claimed the life of his brother Timothy Haskell.

Captain Thomas Theodore Haskell is survived by wife Barbara, three daughters Meaghan, Erin, and Tara, and his sister Dawn.

Note: my work on Feed On Feeds mods has been forked off as MonkeyChow.

For a while now I’ve been working on my own version of Feed On Feeds 0.1.9 at MonkeyChow.org. A couple of years ago, new great-sounding features were announced for FoF, but the code was never released.

Now, Steve Minutillo has announced the long awaited 0.5 version in the GCode repository. But… still no code available! It will be interesting to compare the features and see which has the most efficient and well-featured RSS handling.

Update: Now one month later there is no further word. Has Steve abandoned us again?

Update: The code was released, but it seems to basically have some of the same flaws. I’ll keep on pushing with MonkeyChow.