Feed Friends – Page 4 – Binary Orders of Magnitude

Feed Friends is open

Right before going to Syndicate conference, I opened Feed Friends to public.

It’s still in very raw state and several actions fail without giving user any feedback e.g.:

Atom feeds are not supported yet
If feed fails to pass initial import it appears untitled
and some more

But it works for me, works form some other people and clearly worth opening – just expect it to be fixed on the go.

I’m also going to create some feedback and discussion mechanism (either forum or mail-list) in near future but for now, feel free to submit all your concerns as comments to this entry.

And I hope to see more news shared by you!

Sergey

FeedFriends toolbar

FeedFriends toolbar left incubator and now available to all users.

Now all the links in the feed are converted on the fly to toolbar links (with same base module that absolutizes links and helps to see those images that got corrupted otherwise).

What it means is that target page is opened inside a frame and on the top of that frame there is another tiny frame (36 pixels high at the moment) that contains “share” button, feed item title and a link to the initial link (in case you’d like to get back to where you started).

This toolbar significantly saved my time when I tried to chase stories (to share them) after I clicked deeper into the story which happens quite often.

P.S. some sites (e.g. Make magazine) coded their pages in the way that it detects being opened inside a frame and jumps our of it. I’m sorry to say that this can’t be reasonably avoided and I respect site owners decision to do so. In this case you’ll have to feel the pain and get back the feed item in your reeder to share it until I find some other tricks (like popups instead of toolbar or URL posting – both were given serious thoughts for this or other reasons).

Links are absolutized now

Now links in descriptions are being absolutized relative to original feed URL upon fetching. This is supposed to fix missing images and broken links which are caused by feed item being moved from original feed (preprocessed feed, then friends feed and so on).

Perl camel I wrote perl class that allows changing all links in HTML code in one call (will be used for some other features as well) and a subclass that absolutizes it based on some URL.
It will be my first OpenSource Perl module that goes up on CPAN – it will be available soon at http://search.cpan.org/~sergeyche/

OPMLs are fixed

OPML generation is fixed so I hope you’ll get correct results.

You can regenerate OPML without changing the list of feeds by just clicking here.

If you still have bugs, please let me know by making a comment to this post including bug description and OPML feed URL.

User posts are gone

I’m sorry to say that but all items shared so far (all 21 of them) were lost during old item deletion process testing.

Luckily only 2 of them were not mine, sorry, Dima, I hope that overall system performance will make you happy and you’ll forget those two tiny messages.

P.S. I’ll be making daily backups of the database to avoid this problem in the future.