Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom)

[koan]

There are still a few bugs and so I will post them here so at least you know about them.

Thanks for the feedback, it's very useful.

I reproduced the bug I think; the feed wasn't deleted but its name was changed and all the articles were copied from the feed that was being updated at the time. After checking the feed information and seeing that the URL of the feed was unchanged I did an update on that feed and was back to normal. This will be fixed in the next version.

I'm not sure how to implement categories without taking up more screen real estate. How many feeds are you subscribed to and how often do you update ? Personally, I have about 20-30 feeds and I'm updating feeds on my Zaurus only when I travel somewhere. At home I run Zocalo on my Linux desktop most days.

[xamindar]

I'm not sure how to implement categories without taking up more screen real estate. How many feeds are you subscribed to and how often do you update ? Personally, I have about 20-30 feeds and I'm updating feeds on my Zaurus only when I travel somewhere. At home I run Zocalo on my Linux desktop most days.

Take a look at dmblogger. It had categories set up in a tree very nicely. For example:
-News
   BBC
   Slashdot
+Music
-Deals
   Slickdeals
   Fatwallet

The categories could be expanded or collapsed to show or hide its contents. That allows good use of screen real estate. No idea how hard it would be to code that change, just an idea.

Also, I can't find any way to organize the list. All my feeds are just listed in the order tgat I added them.

By the way, what does the "Get Enclosure" option do? It doesn't seem to effect anything for me.

Again, thanks. As it is this feeder is good enough for me.

[koan]

Take a look at dmblogger. It had categories set up in a tree very nicely.

It's a QListView. I also use a QListView. I had thought about doing this kind of hierarchical layout but you waste a line for each category and when you collapse a branch you are "hiding" feeds. I'm going to think about other ways to implement categories.

By the way, what does the "Get Enclosure" option do? It doesn't seem to effect anything for me.

It's for downloading podcasts. As I understand it, podcasts were originally mp3 files attached to RSS feeds. When I say attached, I mean there is a bit of XML giving the URL of the mp3 file. When you select "Get Enclosure" you download the file to your downloads directory which is set in the Storage tab of the settings.

Atom feeds can have more than one enclosure, it's for the case where you offer different formats of the same content, for example, podcast1.mp3, podcast1.ogg, podcast1.aac, etc. If there is more than one enclosure a dialog will appear to ask you which one you want to download.

Enclosures don't have to be only for podcasts, you can link to any MIME type. It didn't do anything for you because there was no enclosure in the item of the feed you were looking at.  Here you can see a feed item with an enclosure, in this case a JPEG image of 99 Bytes:

The last line in the header shows there is an enclosure.

If you want to try it, I have a test feed at http://www.lyndonhill.com/test.rss ; it has 2 items and both have small images as enclosures.

In the next version of Zocalo these menu items and tool buttons are ghosted when they are not applicable.

[xamindar]

Ok, thanks for that explanation. I should have paid attention to the context menu. At least organizing them makes it more readable without having categories.

Also, in your picture all your feeds have the sites icon next to them. Most of mine just have a green orb. I assume that is because I added most of my feeds while offline? Some of the new ones I added while online have the proper icons. Do I have to delete them and re-add to get the icons?

[koan]

in your picture all your feeds have the sites icon next to them. Most of mine just have a green orb. I assume that is because I added most of my feeds while offline?

No, adding feeds when offline should make no difference to whether they have the site icon or a default icon.

[!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=xamindar)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(xamindar)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Some of the new ones I added while online have the proper icons. Do I have to delete them and re-add to get the icons?[/quote]

Search for the icon is performed only when you add a feed. If you have older feeds that were added with Zocalo 1.3 or older then they won't get icons - you'll have to delete them and add them again.

There are some cases where it's not possible to get the icon. If Zocalo can't find an icon and you think it should then please let me know the URL and I will look into it.

[xamindar]

Search for the icon is performed only when you add a feed.

Ok, that explains it. All my non-icon ones were added while offline and it was unable to check when I added them. Zocalo 1.5 is the first version I have tried so it's not due to an older version.

There are some cases where it's not possible to get the icon. If Zocalo can't find an icon and you think it should then please let me know the URL and I will look into it.

Well, I also have slashdot but mine has no icon like yours does. I'll give re-adding them a try. Thanks.

[koan]

Well, I also have slashdot but mine has no icon like yours does. I'll give re-adding them a try. Thanks.

No, I mean that adding a feed offline should not stop it from finding the icon. Uh, I can see some other problems now, too. This is worse than I thought. I know where the problems are so I'll try to get them fixed soon. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

[xamindar]

No, I mean that adding a feed offline should not stop it from finding the icon. Uh, I can see some other problems now, too. This is worse than I thought. I know where the problems are so I'll try to get them fixed soon. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Hey no problem. I also just noticed today that after I organized all my feeds, it will revert back to the unorganized order they were in before when I close Zocalo and reopen it again. I'm just re-adding them all anyway in the correct order from the start so it's no big deal. Just thought I'd let you know in case it is another bug.

[koan]

Zocalo 1.6 is now available.

This should address all known issues. However, I haven't been able to test everything. For example, I have no way of testing if the proxy username/password works. There were some issues during start up - it's not possible for me to create all the possible situations that may have arisen.

If you are upgrading from 1.5 then user defined feed positions may be "lost" one final time as Zocalo sorts itself out; after the first time you run & quit 1.6 feed positions should be remembered.

In all previous versions of Zocalo you weren't really supposed to go browsing articles during updates but I didn't prevent the user from doing this either. It was my intention that I would eventually freeze the UI during updates. In the state I left it you could mess up your saved feeds quite badly, but no serious loss of configuration. I decided to let you browse feeds during updates and this is all implemented cleanly now but it's better if you don't because it's slow.

There is a new "Reload Feed" function to reload a feed that you have already added. If Zocalo didn't pick up the icon then you can choose this option instead of copying the feed URL, deleting it and re-adding it. Other features and fixes are mentioned on the Zocalo homepage.

Please continue to report bugs or problems.

[xamindar]

Thanks for the update. It seemed to be working better but then something happened tonite after I rebooted my zaurus. When I opened Zocalo only 3 of my feeds were showing. Then I tried opening it from the console and saw this:

Code: [Select]

bash-2.05$ zocalo
Display size = 480x640
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 5
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 5
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: unexpected end of file in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 76
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: unexpected end of file in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 38
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: tag mismatch in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 293
Parsing error
I guess I need to add them all again. Not sure what caused this. I'll let you know if it happens again.

[koan]

It looks like your article store is corrupted.

By the sounds of it, you exited zocalo after updating many feeds and rebooted while it was still saving (?) Saving feeds to disk takes time, especially Flash memory storage on Zaurus. It's the price you pay for being able to run your battery down and not lose everything.

It's odd that it has caused you so many problems. At most, one feed would be corrupted and the other feeds be in the state before the update.

Originally, I tried to add a dialog to make you wait at exit so that you would know zocalo is still working but it didn't work well and I removed it. I'll have to look into it again.

Could you possibly email me your article store, in it's current state ? It's all the xml files in /home/zaurus/Applications/zocalo

Do a "tar cvf store.tar *.xml*; gzip store.tar" in that directory. Send the store.tar.gz file to emptystate at yahoo dot co dot uk.

If you are uncomfortable with sending the files, then perhaps you could do a ls -l so I can see what files are in there.

[koan]

Version 1.7 is now available.

xamindar pointed out a couple of bugs which I fixed and I changed some of the behaviour to make it more usable:

On start up loading the feeds is delayed just long enough so the main window can open. If you have many feeds with lots of articles you will now see a please wait message. Hopefully this will make you feel confident that it hasn't simply crashed.

After updating a feed it is now saved to disk immediately (previously Zocalo saved one feed every 2 minutes and everything else when you exit).

[xamindar]

A couple issues I am noticing in this version. First of all (and this is probably only me experiencing it) I can not launch Zocalo from the icon, nothing happens. I have to run it from the qkonsole application by typing "zocalo". I have checked the launcher icon and it is set to run "zocalo" as its command so I have no idea why it doesn't work. I have tried removing and reinstalling zocalo 1.7 with no change.

Second issue is that it will try to update all feeds on its own without me telling it to. I haven't narrowed it down to the cause yet but it seems to try to update all feeds on its own constantly once I have suspended my zaurus and unsuspended it again. It gets quite annoying when there is no internet connection and it keeps popping up telling me the hostname of a feed failed to resolve.

All in all the program is very stable and all feeds are working perfectly. Thanks!

[koan]

Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, both these things are "works for me" issues.

I can not launch Zocalo from the icon, nothing happens. I have to run it from the qkonsole application by typing "zocalo".

This must be something to do with the recent changes to get the main window to open before loading the data. Are you absolutely sure that the program does not start, did you check using ps or WhatsUpOnZ ?

Second issue is that it will try to update all feeds on its own without me telling it to.

I will try more soak testing. I can think of a few things I could change that may be related but I need a series of actions to reliably reproduce this bug.

[xamindar]

. Are you absolutely sure that the program does not start, did you check using ps or WhatsUpOnZ ?

Absolutely. Every time I tap the icon there is a refresh of the screen as if it tried to open for a split second and then nothing. Not running either.

I will try more soak testing. I can think of a few things I could change that may be related but I need a series of actions to reliably reproduce this bug.

I'll do some more testing to see if I can narrow down the cause and how to reproduce.



Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot. It will not launch at all in portrate mode, not even from the console. I get the following in the console if I try to run it in portrate mode:

Code: [Select]

bash-2.05$ zocalo
QLinuxFbScreen::connect() disp spec Transformed:Rot270:Vga:0 != server di
sp spec Transformed:Rot0:Vga:0
Transformed driver cannot connect
Aborted