Monthly Archives: December 2005

UPDATE: Ryan from Engadget says: We’re aware of the issue and are working as quickly as possible to correct it. Thanks for your patience!

Here is the problem report I submitted to Engadget:

Hi there!

I’ve been seeing a lot of entries from Engadget reappear over and over recently(as updated items and as new items) in my aggregator(I’m using Gregarius), so I did a little digging.

There are at least two problems with your feed.

1) The order of attributes for your html tags changes over time, causing aggregators to think an item has changed. Specifically, the alt tag for images in items changes position in a given item, even though nothing else has changed.

2) This may be a one time thing. I noticed that some items in my database for engadget items have a permalink starting with http://www.engadget.com and others, with the same content start with http://engadget.com – I assume this happened once and the problem will go away.

This file has 4 items from my aggregator’s database that refer to the same content. If you compare 1.txt with 3.txt, you will notice problem #1 mentioned above. If you compare 1.txt with 2.txt, you will notice problem #2 mentioned above.

Thanks for your time.

John

UPDATE: I changed the title from todo list to wish list. I started with writing only the things I planned to do and it quickly grew into a list of things I want to happen.

UPDATE: More tasks added to the bottom. I started working on a few items a couple days ago and I’m making OK progress.

Gregarius is a solid, solid, solid RSS Aggregator. Since I discovered it several weeks ago, the team has been extremely welcoming and supportive as I add my little adjustments here and there and ask tons of questions about the engine. Another thing the team apparently excels at is writing maintainable, extendable, modular, friendly code. The architecture is such that everything I’ve wanted to add was easy to add.

On to the things I want to tackle next(this part of the post is a note to myself, mostly). I have several days off for the holiday and after spending days with my family, I’ll probably spend some nights with Gregarius. Yes, I know I’ll probably only do 5 of these.

• Convert the Hide Empty Feeds feature in my theme into a plugin for use by other themes.
• Break my theme overrides up into individual files(css-layout, css-look, js-functionality, php-outline).
• Consider converting the rss-output theme into an ajax theme.
• Test all Gregarius plugins with my theme. If they don’t work suggest solutions to their authors.
• Sort feed items by popularity(consider common links beteween items in the db and shared links to pages outside of the db).
• Customize the display of feeds that consist only of images(Flickr, etc). I’d like a grid.
• Support IE with Frames theme.
• Multiple-select category/tag/feed form.
• Font size slider that doesn’t change the font for feed titles or the feed list. The slider will only change the font size used for the items.
• Why am I marking items as sticky? I’m sending stuff to del.icio.us – why not send them all there? Figure this out… what does sticky got that del.icio.us doesn’t?
• RSS Feed for feeds that I subscribed to recently.
• Start building aggregator-to-aggregator features. The API can be plain so it’s accessible to all aggregators. Examples: Inbox, Trusted Ratings!!!, Shared RSS Feeds with Shared Read/Unread Status for each Item(support queues, system monitors).
• Sorts for Feed List: Recent Feeds First, Busy(frequent posts) Feeds Last
• One Click Sticky – it’s currently 2 clicks
• TalkDigger for TrackBacks extension to WordPress?
• More Screencasts of Gregarius(using my updated Frames theme).
• Add an “Ajax Desktop” API to Gregarius? Make the pieces of a theme (header, footer, item list, feed/channel/tag list) movable to make room? Is the Google Ajax Desktop API open?
• Add this list to the Gregarius Feature Request tracking system.

UPDATE: More

• When you click on a link in a feed item, the item should be tagged somehow.
• I want to have multiple color schemes accessible with a button combination or a dopdown for the Frames theme.
• The Frames theme needs a new name.
• Can there be a good use for a ticker in an aggregator?
• Can RSS Aggregators be modified to assist in tracking conversations in the blogosphere. To start with, temporary tracking of rss feeds would probably need to happen(for monitoring comments threads, blogs, searches and trackbacks related to a given conversation). What can be learned from memeorandum on this front?
• UI Elements in the Gregarius UI backed by RSS Feeds. This would be a specialized version of an active desktop api. For instance, maybe you’d want images from a flickr feed to fade in and out of the background.
• Configurable(at the feed level) automated purging of high volume feeds. UPDATE: This is already on the Gregarius schedule.
• Alerts – certain keywords or spikes in a particular feed’s volume or whatever might result in an email, IM or page.
• Plugin – Intuit which item the user is looking at, based on mouse movements or keyboard actions. Make the text in that item slightly bigger.
• We need an “Add a Feed” popup menu on the Home page of a gregarius install.
• Nuke URL button – For a given URL, mark all unread items that contain that url as read. The user can specify at the time of nuking how many other links are allowed in an item. If there are too many links in the item, then the Nuke will let that item go because it seems to be a composite post with more than one topic.
• Search unread for selected text or url. Basically, Gregarius should pull up a list of items that are related to text or a url on an item you are already viewing. Pulling up groups of related posts like this will make it faster to get through your unread posts.
• RSS Feed Sidebar – specify as many feeds as you want for a small, out of the way sidebar that displays items chronologically.
• Frames theme option: Sebulba02 wants the div heights to match the height of the contents of the channel list.
• Fix problem with updating channels?
• Regarding the url index – need to be able to de-rank urls, give feeds credibility ratings, etc.
• Updated items should have their own bg color.
• When you mark a page read, you should have two buttons. [Mark these items as read, some of them were interesting.] and [Mark these items as read, none of them were interesting.]. That way, the system could track whether or not feeds, channels and folders have benefitted you. Every few weeks, a link could appear, out of the way, that will give you a list of feeds, folders and categories that you haven’t called interesting recently.
• Categorize multiple feeds at once.
• When switching to Tags or Categories Tabs, the state of Hide empty feeds and Hide folder titles is not respected. Must fix that.
• History view – all items I encountered and the hour and minute I encountered them.
• Levaraging url popularity index: Mark URLs as read, not just posts that link to them. Then, mark certain feeds as ThirdTier. Any ThirdTier feed item should be marked automatically read if it’s only outbound link is to a URL that has been read. The URL read/unread flag should be temporary.
• How can an aggregator be coached to correctly delete uninteresting posts?

• First, we need to make sure that certain feeds are immune from automatic deletion. Though you may not care if digg mentions astronomy, you might care if Dave Winer mentions it.
• Second, let’s specify keywords that add to the kill-score. For me, those might include entertainment news topics, and certain games or gaming platforms, for instance.
• Third, identify characteristics that trump the kill-score. Maybe the terms scoble, scripting.com, Homestead, xbox360, tokash, etc would prevent an item from being scrapped even if it had a high kill-score.
• Gregarius needs right click menus on feeds and items.

• Feeds: delete feed, deprecate feed, mark feed read, categorize
• Items: sticky, categorize