Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom) Options

[koan]

Hi

Zocalo is a lightweight web feed reader for the Sharp ROM. It is designed for the PDA form factor, i.e. make sensible use of a small screen, use keyboard or stylus to navigate everything, don't use a lot of memory or disk space. It can handle RSS, RSS RDF and Atom.

I have been testing Zocalo for a few months now and it seems stable. There are a few minor issues that I want to improve in future releases and I have a lot of ideas for features that I want to implement. I plan to port to the other Zaurus Linuxes.

Please find more details at the Zocalo web page.

This image is linked to a screenshot of the latest version on my website:

[koan]

Zocalo 1.9 is now available.

The main enhancement for this version is support for IDN (Internationalised Domain Names). However, I only found one IDN feed to test with, at http://アニメ.com. It seems to work fine and I have no reason to believe that any other IDN will be different, but I would be a lot happier if I had been able to test with lots of other feeds. Let me know if it doesn't work for any other feeds.

Zocalo parses out useless HTML in feed descriptions. These tags are usually images that Zocalo doesn't download, advertisements or other things that QTextBrowser won't display anyway. This also saves on disk space. I added script, noscript and HTML comments to this version. I noticed that アニメ.com stuffs a lot of broken HTML and also tables into the description - it's not a good feed for testing unfortunately. Tables cause trouble with QTextBrowser so in the next release tables will also be parsed out.

This should also cure the problem jakfish was seeing - PM me if it doesn't.

[jakfish]

Success, success. SL-C1000 installs Zocalo 1.9 without complaint. It's a great program and thank you very much for it. It's fast, updates quickly, and I've gotten no errors.

One small thing: the Fn-U or Fn-D doesn't move the selected feed for organization. But the tap-hold-up or down does work.

Up until now, I've uses Mobireader, which downloads the entire articles from the feed for copying to PDAs/phones. Is it possible to do the same with Zocalo, download the full articles from a given feed? That would make off-line reading a real pleasure, since going to the full article through Netfront can take time to load.

Again, thank you for such hard work,
Jake

[koan]

One small thing: the Fn-U or Fn-D doesn't move the selected feed for organization.

It works on my 750 and 3200.

Anyone else having this problem ?
Could it be that the 1000 has different keycodes ?

Up until now, I've uses Mobireader, which downloads the entire articles from the feed for copying to PDAs/phones.

If I understand correctly, you want to scrape a web page: download the HTML, style sheets, javascripts, images and save it all ?

I think that sounds like a lot of work. Zocalo would have to parse an HTML file to work out which external files to download. I wouldn't even dream of writing an HTML parser, I would have to find an external library to do it. It doesn't really sound like it is in the scope of a feed reader.

I'm sorry, I have other Zaurus projects that need my attention and I'm not so interested in offline web browsing. I could look at writing a "bookmarks" file for links you are interested. You could write a Perl script by yourself to scrape each link when you are online again using curl. Or how about writing a scraper in Ruby/QT that could read this file, select a link to scrape from the GUI and then open it in NetFront ?

By the way, some websites don't like being scraped. They will serve a 404 and blacklist your IP address or even your IP block. It happened to me; I wrote a recursive scraping script some time before I realised that scraping was frowned upon. Fortunately for me I moved house and ISP, not so lucky for the next guy.

You can already send a link from Zocalo to another application by qcop. I could add a feature for copying the link to the clipboard or beam it via IRDA; if that would be useful.

[jakfish]

I think Mobireader is a much more basic program and downloads the text only, but in its entirety. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a Linux version, but on Windows, users install a desktop Mobireader, set up their feeds, then the whole article of a given feed is synced to the pda/phone in a *.prc file (OpieReader reads them perfectly)

It would be as if zocalo pulled in the complete article rather than the first paragraph or whatever the rss gives out.

Sorry not to be clearer,
Jake

[koan]

I think Mobireader is a much more basic program and downloads the text only, but in its entirety.

If you could get the link from Zocalo, you could download the HTML file using curl and then convert it to a suitable format for OpieReader (for example). Without style sheets it would probably be best to convert to some variant of plain text/rich text