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  #1  
Old July 3rd 12, 09:54 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Franc Zabkar
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 1,702
Default RSS feed reader

Can anyone suggest an RSS feed reader that has the following features:

lean
displays messages in plain text
organises each feed as a separate database file
can save selected messages to user defined database files
searchable databases
filterable databases
can launch selected message in external browser

RSSOwl looked promising until I discovered that it uses a single
database file for EVERYTHING, including my saved messages (why ???!!!)

I'm currently using Opera 9.64. Its RSS client is OK, but Opera
organises its feeds by date rather than by group. That is, there is a
separate directory for each day of the month rather than a separate
directory for each feed. These directories contain MBS files, with
each MBS file containing a single message which can be from any feed.
I would prefer a database where each MBS file concatenates all the
messages in a particular feed, in the same way that my email client
(Eudora) and newsreader (Forte Agent) do. Furthermore, Opera uses a
single index file for the entire database -- I would prefer separate
indexes for each feed, just like Eudora and Agent.

BTW, I am reticent to upgrade Opera. The last time I did this I was
hit with a resource leak problem. Opera's developers have stated that
they do not test Opera under Windows 98 except to confirm that it
launches and runs.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
  #2  
Old July 3rd 12, 11:13 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 2,951
Default RSS feed reader

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Can anyone suggest an RSS feed reader


What exactly is RSS anyways?

I mean, beyond the technical explanation, what exactly is it?

What does it do for the end-user that viewing a simple web-page doesn't
do?

How does it convey information (text, graphics, images, etc) differently
vs a web browser?
  #3  
Old July 4th 12, 01:58 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Franc Zabkar
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 1,702
Default RSS feed reader

On Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:13:58 -0400, 98 Guy put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Can anyone suggest an RSS feed reader


What exactly is RSS anyways?

I mean, beyond the technical explanation, what exactly is it?

What does it do for the end-user that viewing a simple web-page doesn't
do?

How does it convey information (text, graphics, images, etc) differently
vs a web browser?


You've essentially answered your own question. There are no "simple"
web-pages.

An RSS feed reader presents articles in a format which is very similar
to that which I consider ideal, namely the plain-text, no frills
format that I'm using right now. Contrast this to the bloated,
convoluted, ad-infested, Javascript based web forums such as
Seagate's, Western Digital's, and Tom's Hardware.

For example, to read a Seagate post and reply to it, and then see the
updated thread, I have to put up with around 1.5MB of crap. And all
this is required just to exchange a couple of paragraphs of plain
text. I remember that in the early 1990s I accessed Seagate's
Singapore BBS via a 2400bps dialup modem with a 286 PC running MS-DOS.
Today I need an octuple core CPU and a 200Mbps broadband connection to
achieve the same end. BTW Seagate's reply box requires HTML or "rich
text" input. There is no plain text option.

Here is a typical forum page:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracu...d-p/ata_drives

Here is Google's text-only cache of the same URL:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...d-p/ata_drives

This is what is available via RSS (best viewed in an RSS feed reader):
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/rss/bo....id=ata_drives

Here is an RSSOwl screenshot:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Rssowl_big.gif

Some RSS messages only provide a short intro to the full web based
article, but Seagate's and WD's messages are complete on their own.

Another big advantage of RSS is that one can save and organise the
information in a convenient way. Contrast that to saving web pages in
your browser.

In fact my Opera RSS database has become corrupted, so I am
temporarily importing the MBS files into Eudora as a backup. They
display just like any other email message.

One other popular use of RSS feeds is to access news articles from
providers such as ABC, BBC, CNN, Engadget, etc.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
  #4  
Old July 4th 12, 03:16 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 2,951
Default RSS feed reader

Franc Zabkar wrote:

What does it do for the end-user that viewing a simple web-page
doesn't do?

How does it convey information (text, graphics, images, etc)
differently vs a web browser?


You've essentially answered your own question. There are no "simple"
web-pages.

An RSS feed reader presents articles in a format which is very similar
to that which I consider ideal, namely the plain-text, no frills
format that I'm using right now. Contrast this to the bloated,
convoluted, ad-infested, Javascript based web forums such as
Seagate's, Western Digital's, and Tom's Hardware.


When you say "articles", I would have assumed you meant media or news
stories. Items that you might read in a magazine or newspaper.

I generally don't have a problem with web-forums being overly complex or
bloated - possibly because of my very liberal use of HOSTS file entries.

Here is a typical forum page:


http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracu...d-p/ata_drives

I opened that page in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.20) and did a little
detective work. I then added the following lines to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 stx.i.lithium.com
127.0.0.1 nexus.ensighten.com
127.0.0.1 metrics.seagate.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.clicktale.net

And I added "forums.seagate.com" to the list of sites that my
"YesScript" firefox add-on blocks from running scripts.

I then started "DuMeter" just to get a total bytes transfered between my
computer and the internet for a test to see how much data is involved in
rendering the above web-page. (I made sure no other processes were
running that talk to the interet during this test).

So with the above entries in my hosts file, the numbers a

Downloaded: 27.1 kb
Uploaded: 1.8 kb
Total: 28.9 kb

Next, I renamed my hosts file (so it would play no role in blocking web
requests) and re-loaded the above web-page (I did not remove the seagate
entry in YesScript, however):

Downloaded: 65.5 kb
Uploaded: 7.8 kb
Total: 73.4 kb

So I reduced by more than 50% the amount of data that was transfered to
render the above seagate web-page. There appeared to be no difference
(visually speaking) between the two versions.

Here is an RSSOwl screenshot:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Rssowl_big.gif


It sort-of makes that web-forum look like what I see with Netscape
Navigator when I'm reading / posting to usenet.

My strategy for improving my web-experience is to start with the MVPS
hosts file and then build on it by looking closely at what my most
frequented web-sites are doing as far as accessing tracking /
user-metrics and advertising servers, and then adding those machines to
my hosts file.

This works not only for web-forums, but ALL web-content that I happen to
browse to.

I've even gone beyond the hosts file by having a web-server (Abyss)
operating on my machine, serving up a selected set of script files that
I find are commonly accessed by many websites. These are mostly ajax
and jquery script files. I download these scripts, decompress them,
look for "irritating" external references (facebook, twitter, etc) and
remove them, and then serve them up to my browser as dictated by my
hosts file.

I think I have something like 20 lines in my hosts file devoted just to
blocking access to various facebook servers. Maybe a dozen for google's
various ad-servers.

So that's my solution for removing the internet crud from my
web-experience.
  #5  
Old July 4th 12, 10:26 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Bill in Co
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 701
Default RSS feed reader

98 Guy wrote:
Franc Zabkar wrote:

snip

I opened that page in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.20) and did a little
detective work. I then added the following lines to my hosts file:


Just out of curiosity, why are you still using FF 2.0? You can run FF 3.5
with KernelEx (I just checked it out), and it's a bit more
capable/compatible on the various web sites nowadays (including YouTube,
provided you've updated Flash, too). Is there some great reason for
sticking with FF 2.0?


  #6  
Old July 4th 12, 12:55 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 2,951
Default RSS feed reader

Bill in Co wrote:

Just out of curiosity, why are you still using FF 2.0? You can
run FF 3.5 with KernelEx


I tried running several versions of FF 3 about 1.5 to 2 years ago and
found that when scrolling a web-page up and down that a white line would
appear across any bit-mapped images on the page where they were cut off
by the frame before being scrolled up or down.

I think this problem is described in the following links:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477236

http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.p...ot-in-Explorer

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201198

http://www.neebar.com/2008/05/mozill...izontal-lines/

Some people have mentioned seeing it in the win-98 forum on msfn as
well.

But honestly, I find that FF 2.0.0.20 works VERY WELL on 99% of the web
sites that I browse to.

Also regarding FF 3.x, I recall problems with the menu icons doing
strange things (disappearing, turning into noise, colors of the menu
bars becoming inverted). This was back in early 2011 and I've since
changed the video card in this computer (I had Nvidia MX440, now have
Nvidia 6200) and maybe that change combined with the newer version of
KernelEx it might make a difference - but trying FF 3 is not high on my
priority list right now...
  #7  
Old July 4th 12, 04:37 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Lostgallifreyan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,562
Default RSS feed reader

98 Guy wrote in :

Also regarding FF 3.x, I recall problems with the menu icons doing
strange things (disappearing, turning into noise, colors of the menu
bars becoming inverted). This was back in early 2011 and I've since
changed the video card in this computer (I had Nvidia MX440, now have
Nvidia 6200) and maybe that change combined with the newer version of
KernelEx it might make a difference - but trying FF 3 is not high on my
priority list right now...


I used to see that even with FF2, but also with some larger non-networked
programs. I especially saw it with programs intended to take scrolled
screenshots of large web pages. There are two main reasons for it: GDI
resources not being freed, usually temporary bitmaps; the other being buffer
overruns of dynamically allocated memory. The first case usually results in
failed draws, lines across pages etc, but rarely a crash, just a failure of
drawing that usually gets corrected (mostly) once the offending program is
shut down and the OS cleans up as best it can. The over-run problem is more
insidious, often subtle stuff like button glyphs getting scrambled or
vanishing, and this can persist after a program exits as the damage is
already done to bits of memory belonging to other data, or processeses. A
reboot is usually needed to fix that.

In either case the best test for all programs is to leave them loaded, and
use them often. The longer they stick around without doing anything weird,
the better the chances in the long term in any context. There are all kinds
of 'clever' coders methods for testing but they are all but worthless, for
ther same reason that you cann NOT, EVER, test the performance of a program
with a timer that runs on the same CPU the process runs on, no matter how
clever the method appears. The crude, common-sense methods of using extermnal
timers, watching how stuff runs in general use, is always better. And the
offending process is often not the one we first think it is...

(That last remark is because there was one version of the 'Common Controls'
library that did very strange things, but any latest-known-fix updater of
those will be ok.)

Changing a video card shouldn't be a direct cause of differences in stuff
like this, but its drivers might be. Changes in KernelEx could be, but only
the files that handle graphics resources. Or maybe buffer over-runs may be
caused if any of those files are hacked or patched rather than just
transplanted into W98.

Thrash-testing with a media player, a browser, and some heavy-weight audio
processing, and still image processing, will show up weaknesses fast. (Video
encoding won't, because there's not much going on beyond number crunching).

One very good way to thrash test is to see if W98 can load a HUGE image into
an image editor, close it, and reload it afterwards, immediately, without
showing a big blank space instead of the image. This test [partly depends on
available RAM, but it does test how well the garbage collection works,
amongst other GDI freeing stuff. I don't know the details very well, but if
you can reload a 10000x6000 pixel image right after closing it, and do it
three or four times without any graphics errors, it shows that the editor and
the GDI subsystem, are working well enough. Maybe DirectX has something to do
with this too but I'm not sure because I always have DXv9c here, so no
alternate context for comparisons.
  #8  
Old July 5th 12, 09:54 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Franc Zabkar
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 1,702
Default RSS feed reader

On Tue, 03 Jul 2012 22:16:55 -0400, 98 Guy put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Franc Zabkar wrote:

Here is a typical forum page:


http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracu...d-p/ata_drives

I opened that page in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.20) and did a little
detective work. I then added the following lines to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 stx.i.lithium.com
127.0.0.1 nexus.ensighten.com
127.0.0.1 metrics.seagate.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.clicktale.net

And I added "forums.seagate.com" to the list of sites that my
"YesScript" firefox add-on blocks from running scripts.

I then started "DuMeter" just to get a total bytes transfered between my
computer and the internet for a test to see how much data is involved in
rendering the above web-page. (I made sure no other processes were
running that talk to the interet during this test).

So with the above entries in my hosts file, the numbers a

Downloaded: 27.1 kb
Uploaded: 1.8 kb
Total: 28.9 kb

Next, I renamed my hosts file (so it would play no role in blocking web
requests) and re-loaded the above web-page (I did not remove the seagate
entry in YesScript, however):

Downloaded: 65.5 kb
Uploaded: 7.8 kb
Total: 73.4 kb

So I reduced by more than 50% the amount of data that was transfered to
render the above seagate web-page. There appeared to be no difference
(visually speaking) between the two versions.


Thanks very much for your detective work.

Your low figures left me wondering whether I was having a brain fart.
In fact the bulk of the crap is only downloaded when I hit the Reply
button in any thread. Moreover, the figure of 1.5MB, which I measured
about a year ago, has now grown to 2.2MB, as reported by Opera's byte
counter.

For example, I recently replied to the following threads:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/forums/...ssage-id/28997
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/forums/...ssage-id/28999
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/forums/...ssage-id/29003

You need to be logged in to see the above pages, but suffice to say
that those 3 simple text-based replies necessitated downloading 6.6MB
of crap (= 3 x 2.2MB). Whatever this crap is, it is not cached.

Here is an RSSOwl screenshot:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Rssowl_big.gif


It sort-of makes that web-forum look like what I see with Netscape
Navigator when I'm reading / posting to usenet.


That's exactly why I like RSS.

My strategy for improving my web-experience is to start with the MVPS
hosts file and then build on it by looking closely at what my most
frequented web-sites are doing as far as accessing tracking /
user-metrics and advertising servers, and then adding those machines to
my hosts file.

This works not only for web-forums, but ALL web-content that I happen to
browse to.


I've done that for several other forums, but I use OffByOne (no
Javascript support) as my preferred browser for Seagate, WD, and Tom's
Hardware. However, there are complications when you need to post to
these forums. Anyway I'll do some more experimenting when I get the
chance.

I've even gone beyond the hosts file by having a web-server (Abyss)
operating on my machine, serving up a selected set of script files that
I find are commonly accessed by many websites. These are mostly ajax
and jquery script files. I download these scripts, decompress them,
look for "irritating" external references (facebook, twitter, etc) and
remove them, and then serve them up to my browser as dictated by my
hosts file.


That's very clever.

I think I have something like 20 lines in my hosts file devoted just to
blocking access to various facebook servers. Maybe a dozen for google's
various ad-servers.


Likewise.

BTW, whatever happened to *real* social networks? :-)

http://www.borowitzreport.com/2010/0...ork-phonebook/

So that's my solution for removing the internet crud from my
web-experience.


I also make extensive use of Google's text-only cache by customising
Opera's r-click menu.

Alternatively, you could implement the above as a customised search.

Just replace "%s" with your desired URL:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...h?strip=1&q=%s

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
  #9  
Old July 5th 12, 11:02 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Lostgallifreyan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,562
Default RSS feed reader

Franc Zabkar wrote in
:

I also make extensive use of Google's text-only cache by customising
Opera's r-click menu.


That's one of Google's really useful things, and as far as I know, unique,
but as Google have revoked code search and other means of getting anything
like precision and reduced noise, don't rely on something like the text
cahced versions remaining indefinitely. Our best hope of small size and high
SNR is the huge demand coming from the owners of all those tiny networked
mobile devices.
  #10  
Old July 6th 12, 04:05 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
98 Guy
External Usenet User
 
Posts: 2,951
Default RSS feed reader

Lostgallifreyan wrote:

Your testing looks thorough, but why do you conclude that a hosts
file works best?


Because it happens at the TCP/IP stack level - and it's a sledge hammer
when it comes to absolutely blocking your machine from being able to
contact any host of your choosing.

And even more - any host that you access frequently you can "hard-code"
it's IP address in your hosts file - giving you ultra-fast DNS lookups.

Many people have said that it can slow things down if it gets
too big.


I've always scratched my head over the claim that a large hosts file can
bog a system down.

It seems to be true that Win-XP (and higher?) have problems with large
hosts files (I think anything larger than 135 kb) and on the MVPS-hosts
web-site they say that the "DNS Server Service" running on NT-based
systems has issues (or is outright incompatible with) large hosts files
- and they recommend that the service be disabled. I really don't see
the benefit of running that service (on the XP systems that I set up at
$Dayjob) and it's one of many services that I disable.

As far as performance on a win-98 system, I have to say that I can
detect no performance degradation by having a hosts file pushing 1 mb in
size.

If DNSBench.exe is an accurate tool when it comes to measuring DNS
performace and hosts-file interference, then again the fastest servers
are operating in the 10 to 20 ms range - pretty much the theoretical
minimum for my DSL connection.

On the other hand, so can huge amounts of RegEx filters in
Proxomitron, but there is a middle ground. Did you try it
and reject it? If so, why?


I've never tried proxomitron.

I find it easier and faster to edit a text file.

Sometimes I will access my router's http admin interface and bring up
the out-going logs to see what hosts my browser has been talking to when
I browse any given website. I find that I can see hosts there in the
log that I can't or don't see when I look at the http source-code of the
page or site or the bottom info bar of the browser.

I know that if I was running an out-bound firewall that I would see that
info there as well (or at least theoretically I should) but I've also
never bothered with a firewall because I see pretty much zero value in
running it full-time on any of my win-98 systems.
 




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