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#1
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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