Reading Lists

[scripting]

This is a major new release, v0.6.0 of the feedland package.

In this release we now support reading lists, as we did in the earlier River products.

Caveat 1

An important caveat -- this upgrade may require some thought, and tweaking, it did for me. I had to shorten the listName and feedUrl in the subscriptions table in order for the new key to fit. You may have a similar problem. Bring it to this list, so we can all look at it. I am not the most skilled SQL guy who subscribes here. ;-)

Caveat 2

The install instructions have not been tested yet. That's why I posted it here first. Please help out, follow the instructions and if you see a problem please speak.

How to upgrade

I've done a special page just for this upgrade.

Status of the code

I have thoroughly debugged it on my test machine on my LAN on a test database.

Yesterday I installed it on feedland.org, and verified that it could subscribe to a reading list, and would receive updates.

We're going to do a lot more testing for sure.

User instructions

The UI is ridiculous, but it gets the job done for now. :-)

I'll be posting a note here in this thread in a bit.

[scripting]

Now some notes on using reading lists in the current release.

Why reading lists now?

I felt that reading lists were an essential part of News Products, something like publishing the source code behind the user interface of an application. We’re not locking people in to our tools for making and running news products. We want ours to be the best, but not the only way to make news products.

And by setting this example, we’re encouraging those who come after to do the same. It’s how OPML became the export format for subscription lists. We want to make sure people don’t lose that feeling.

The user interface for this is ridiculous

1. Open the JavaScript console and enter the name of the function that implements the operation you want to do and invoke it.
2. For the first three commands, a dialog appears asking for the URL of the OPML file for the reading list. Click ok to do it, cancel to get out.
3. For the last command, get a list of your subscriptions, you just have to open the console

The functions

1. subscribeToReadingListCommand ()
2. checkReadingListCommand ()
3. unsubReadingListCommand ()
4. getMyReadingListSubscriptions ()

It'll get better.

Of course there will be nicer ways to do this, ultimately nothing less than the equiv of the Feed List, but that's a fair amount of work. Right now we need to start using reading lists to prove their robustness, and then we can give it a better UI.

Screen shot

Feeds with green titles come from reading lists.

Notes

1. When you subscribe to a reading list, it could take minutes before the feeds in the list show up on your Feed List page, esp if the feeds in the list have not been seen by your server before.
2. They are distinguished by their names being in green, not black.
3. You can click on the title of a green line and get its Feed Info page. It has an extra line where a link to the reading list it comes from is displayed.

[fmfernandes]

Hey @scripting, when working on the reading lists upgrade I got an error for no default value set for urlReadingList. It's worth pointing out on the upgrade instructions that on the 3rd line, it should read:

ALTER TABLE subscriptions ADD urlReadingList VARCHAR (256) NOT NULL DEFAULT "";

[scripting]

@fmfernandes -- thanks! ;-)

change made.

[scripting]

BTW, there are updated versions of feedland and feedlanddatabase, versions 0.6.3 and 0.7.2 respectively.

Fixed a crashing bug in feedlanddatabase.

[scripting]

This suggestion comes via @fmfernandes who has added it to his FeedLand installation with significant performance improvement in generating rivers.

alter table items add index feedItemIndex (flDeleted, pubDate, feedUrl);

I've added it to feedland.org and am considering adding it to the standard install instructions in setup.sql.

[scripting]

New versions of feedland and feedlanddatabase versions 0.6.8 and 0.7.7 respectively.

Major server-side fixes for reading lists.

The new software is running on feedland.org.