A bit of newsRiver hackery
Update: I moved this code over to my space over at hosting.opml.org and added some updater code from Nicholas Riley's webdav tool, so that you should be able to just "Get Latest Code..." once you've got this installed. (Or reinstalled, if you grabbed last night's version.) Also, I fixed a bug or two.
So, I couldn't resist poking around with Dave Winer's newsRiver in the OPML editor. For whomever's interested in this sort of thing, here's the result of a couple of hours' hacking this evening:
In this is a tool to be dropped into your OPML Editor install's Guest Databases / apps / Tools directory, right alongside newsRiver.root itself. You may need to restart the OPML Editor. Once installed, you should see a new "DecafbadNewsRiver" menu item under the Tools menu, allowing you to view your news in this new UI. Expect lots of bugs, though.
Basically, this provides an alternate DHTML outline rendering of the news items gathered by newsRiver—quite similar to what I did back in October for FeedSpool. I'm not sure how far I'll take this, if I take it any farther. I've got a bit of a notion to tackle some REST/AJAX interaction with newsRiver for on-the-spot item deletion, and maybe on-demand item content retrieval.
But, for newsRiver hackers: You might like what I've done with the viewNewsItems script under decafbadNewsRiverSuite. I've made an attempt to pull all of the HTML out of the midst of the processing code. That's was icky, and I hated it back when I first ran into it in Radio UserLand.
I've broken all of that out into smaller external templates for page, feed, and item under decafbadNewsRiverData. This should allow for easier styling and customization of the code that newsRiver produces, as well as maybe swapping themes on the fly with a preference that points the rendering process at a different root table for templates.
In any case, do what you like with this work. I hope it's useful to someone out there.
Archived Comments
neat! i much prefer this interface. thanks much.