So, when I need breaks from the book, I’ve been poking around at NewsRiver customizations in decafbadNewsRiver.root for “fun” programming. You can check out the Release Notes I have so far, but here are a few highlights:
- News items can be filtered by Reading List, and a “Further Reading” list of links to view by filter are displayed at the end of the page after all the news.
- I’ve split just about all the HTML out of the news rendering code into separate templates, for the start of a switchable theme system. These themes can be somewhat self-contained, allowing you to make extensive changes to how the news items are presented, without needing to dig into the core suite of code.
- I stole preferences code from NewsRiver itself to facilitate selecting a theme. It’s actually quite slick and nice to work with.
- The first theme is based on the aggregator UI I’ve been working on since my AmphetaOutlines days, running up through my miniagg implementation. Check out a screenshot of miniagg – that’s pretty much how decafbadNewsRiver looks right now.
Lots and lots of bugs, miles and miles away from any sort of release I want to make, but it’s been neat poking at this UserTalk stuff again, even with the usual creaks and ancient lizard brain corners I’ve run into. I daresay that, while UserTalk and the whole stack isn’t as nice to me as Python, it’s quite a bit more satisfying than PHP.
3 Comments
thanks much for working on this more. i prefer to use your tool for reading news and these latest improvements sound appetizing.
Thanks for your suggestion on my Wordpress blog, Les.
I just downloaded and installed decafbadNewsRiver. I can’t seem to figure out how to filter feeds though. I can expand or collapse feed, but nothing shows up under Further Reading. Am I doing something wrong?
I do have the API enabled–now I see the Delete All button.
Figured it out!
“filtered by Reading List”
It helps if you’re subscribed to more than one reading list. :-)