Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom)

[jakfish]

Thank you for your fast reply.  I'm looking forward to helping troubleshoot 1.9 and please let me know what I can do.

Jake

[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 ?

[!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=jakfish)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(jakfish)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Up until now, I've uses Mobireader, which downloads the entire articles from the feed for copying to PDAs/phones.[/quote]

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

[jakfish]

It's a dilemma, I think, with a lot of RSS Readers, maybe all--the source puts out only so much text, the reader picks that up, and then follows the source's prompt to go to the full article via browser.  Anything more appears to be tricky, or not in demand.  I was just playing around with an RSS feed reader for Nokia, a commercial application, and it takes the same approach.

For some reason, Mobireader, perhaps b/c it was designed for internet-challenged devices, is able to pull in all the text.  I can still run mobireader on a Sharp Mobilon 4100, a CE 2.0 device from the 90s, simply b/c the reader does nothing but show the full article--on the device, mobireader cannot go on-line to update, etc.  That all has to be done from the mobireader desktop, which then syncs articles to the device.

At any rate, yours is a great program and thank you very much for it,
Jake

[koan]

It's a dilemma, I think, with a lot of RSS Readers, maybe all--the source puts out only so much text, the reader picks that up, and then follows the source's prompt to go to the full article via browser.

By definition that is what a feed reader does. Feeds are summaries, the reader is for reading summaries. I'm trying to make it the best reader it can be. If I add too many features then it becomes the 'jack of all trades, expert at none'.

I think it's OK to redefine how a feed reader should work, but just as long as we are not talking about turning it into something different; like a web browser, for example. The other thing is, it has to work well as a PDA application.

[xamindar]

I think Zacolo is fine with the functionality it currently has. Jakfish is right that many sites' feeds have very short summaries but that is the fault of the website, not the program. Gizmodo comes to mind.

Thanks again Koan. One little thing I would like to mention. When I have it update all feeds and it gets to one that fails or times out, it will pop up a box asking if I want to continue or stop the update. While I do find it useful because I can stop the update if the cause is the loss of internet connectivity, it does require that I check it or watch it if I want it to be ready when I need to disconnect internet and head out. Is it possible to add a little timer to that pop-up box? Maybe like 5 or 10 seconds and then it will automatically select continue and finish updating? If not then no worries. I just have one feed that seems to update only 20% of the times I try and that pop-up stops it until I select はい.

Again, great program! It is stable and very useful.

[jakfish]

I agree completely: Zocalo is a wondrous app, making feeds accessible and readable and doing it quickly.  My concern only comes from the website on the other  end.  For instance, I have to fly a lot, and I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.

But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries.  From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote

I wonder if there might not be feeds of feeds out there, meaning an RSS feed that has pieced together complete articles from other feeds.  I'll search that out.

But I in no way meant any disparagement of Zocalo itself.  It does what it's supposed to, and very nicely.

Jake

[koan]

I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.

Tethering via IRDA ? That sounds like it might be slow. But then GPRS is not that fast. I've done tethering by BT on a PAYG phone, it was usable for short sessions.

But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries.  From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote

Right, some feeds are better than others. You're lucky that Zocalo parses out the advertisements because at the end of that useless truncated line would probably be an unrelated image complete with tracking.

On the other hand, some feeds squeeze in everything, so it's no longer a summary. Personally, I don't want to download the whole article because it's slower and takes up more storage space.

@xamindar

I'll do something about that dialog. Thanks for reminding me.

[jakfish]

Re: GPRS--I've yet to figure out bluetooth (I don't have a usb host, for one thing), and I was amazed to find the ir connection so easy with the Nokia.

My browsing is almost completely to mobile sites (instead of cnn.com, I use netfront for m.cnn.com) so it's not dreadfully slow.  But, yeah, trying to pull up the real nyt.com on an ir tether would take forever, I bet.

Jake

[jakfish]

Hi, koan,

I'd love to make a backup of my rss feeds that I've typed into Zocalo.  I don't find them in zocalo.conf.  Are they stored in another file that I can safely tuck away on the desktop?

Jake

[koan]

At the moment there is no convenient way to create a list of subscribed feeds from Zocalo. Each feed is stored in an individual file containing all the information about the feed and all the current articles. Feeds are stored in /home/zaurus/Applications/zocalo/*.xml.

To do a quick backup you could clear all articles via the Storage tab of the settings dialog and then copy the xml files to get all the meta data and URLs.

I would not recommend moving feed files around, i.e. renaming them, copying additional files into that directory or editing the conf file.

[jakfish]

This is a big help; thank you.  I have about 20 feeds and they were a hassle to type in.  Now, at least, I have a directory stored away, and in the event of a crash or failed recovery, I can copy over the directory and maybe get lucky.

Jake