Peter's Blog

I couldn't resist, here is an incredibly complex Gregarius plugin to highlight certain keywords in an rss article. There's no user interface to specify keywords, you have to edit this file. Store this in your Gregarius plugins folder and enable it in the admin.

   1  
   2  <?php
   3  
   4  /// Name: Keyword Highlighter
   5  /// Author: Peter Wilkinson
   6  /// Description: Highlight certain words in feeds
   7  /// Version: 0.0
   8  function __HighlightStuff( $in)
   9  {
  10      $output = preg_replace('/\b(python|django)\b/i', '<span style="color:red;font-size: larger">\\1</span>', $in);
  11  
  12      return $output;
  13  }
  14  
  15  rss_set_hook('rss.plugins.import.description','__HighlightStuff');
  16  ?>

This will highlight the words 'python' and 'django'. More words can be added between the brackets, separated by | characters.

A good idea for a Gregarius plugin, may exist already. The plugin gives a user definable list of keywords, if any are found in a feed then they are displayed highlighted within the article text.

Speed readers can have their favourite subjects leap out at them.

Compared with getting feeds of del.icio.us tags or whatever my scheme has the advantage that it acts like a rating/recommendation system rather than a strict filter.

However, I know nothing about the capabilites of Gregarius plugins.

I like using a web base aggregator so that I can access it from whereever I may be and it will remember my subscrptions and what articles I have already read. For some time I've been toying with the idea of installing an RSS aggregator on my dedicated server. This would be something to replace bloglines but which I could tweak to my liking. I haven't been in a big hurry to do this as bloglines has been ok thus far. However, the other day I was using it and I realised how slow it can be, waiting for it to download new articles. I thought this was an excellent reason to seek alternatives.

I had a look around for web based aggragators and found the wikipedia list of news aggregators and from this I found Gregarius. Installation was very straightforward:

• Create mysql database, user and password for it
• untar Gregarius into domain directory
• edit config file to tell it details of the database
• access it through web server.

It's pretty standard LAMP stuff.

It's nice to use, very configurable, much more so than bloglines. You can control when the feeds get aggregated (for now I plan to press the refresh button to manually trigger aggregation), how many articles per page, you can read as a 'river of news' (articles from different sources mixed togther by creation date) or read them grouped by feed. Other aggregators only support the 'river of news' format which I don't really like as I don't like to mentally context switch between unrelated topics between each posting: for example, first post is a dilbert cartoon, followed by bbc news about untimely deaths, followed by an engadget piece about a new mp3 player, it's all over the place. I prefer to go through my feeds in the order that is interesting to me at the time (cherry pick, Dilbert first normally).

Gregarius supports a few themes and plugins and so far these have fixed the minor quibbles I had. For example, I wanted to read postings in order of creation rather than newest first which means reading down the page. However, the 'mark all as read and get some more' button was at the top of the page some once I got to the bottom I had to scroll to the top to get more articles. Someone had already had this problem and there was a plugin available to put an extra button at the bottom of the page.

One little hack I had to do was with the 'lilina' theme which supports a button to collapse the left sidebar which will be useful on my Dell d410 with a 12" screen. However, this theme also collapses the articles down to titles by default which I did not want. I fixed this be editing the themes/lilina/item.php file as follows:

    <!--pcw <div class="content" id="c<?php echo rss_item_id(); ?>" style="display:none">-->
    <div class="content" id="c<?php echo rss_item_id(); ?>" style="display:block"

i.e. by default the article contents is display:block rather than display:none.

What I most miss from bloglines is being able to press 'j' to go to the next article.

What I dislike about Gregarius most is that it isn't spelt Gregarious.

ToDo: figure out how to get cron to prune old articles from the database. It can be done explicitly through the admin pages but I don't want more chores.