Developer Blog

Have you sometimes had the situation where the web page that you really like to read with Feedreader does not have RSS feed. I have been in this situation quite a lot of times. So we did a little bit of hacking and released a tool called HTML2RSS to public.

So what does this tool do? Basically it's a little webserver that you can access from URL http://localhost:8182. If you open this location then you will see a brief description of usage. I will copy the example here and explain it :

http://localhost:8182/?serverurl=http://bbc.co.uk&feedtitle=BBC%20scraped%20feed&linkfilter=news.bbc.co.uk&encoding=gb2312

• serverurl : url for target webpage (without RSS feed)
• feedtitle : title for feed that you are creating (if you omit this variable then feed title will be webpage url)
• linkfilter : return only links that contain string provided by linkfilter variable (if you omit this variable then all links are taken from webpage).
• encoding : output encoding (must be the same as encoding of webpage). If you omit this variable then tool tries to get encoding itself but it does not work every time.

So this is it. Just let the application run and add this example link to Feedreader. News will come in :).

HINT : This tool works with other RSS readers, too :).

DISCLAIMER : This is not official product. This is just tool that we are experimenting with. We will hopefully develop it a little bit further (tray option) but development priority can be hectic :).


Download
HTML2RSS can be downloaded from here.
 
Newer version of HTML2RSS running as windows service can be downloaded from here. Just install it with command line "html2rss_service.exe /install" and then start from services control panel.

Hi!

We are announcing Feedreader 3.10 RC1 today. Hopefully this will also be stable release if we do not get major bugs during testing of RC1.

RC1 can be downloaded from here.

Changes:

• Fixes to enclosure downloading
• Fixes to timezone related functions
• Now you can copy from feed editbox (it was not possible before)
• Published options for duplicate grouping and ratings.
• Printing from minibrowser window works now
  

Hi!

We have been quite busy, that's why not many updates in this blog at the moment. We are trying to get 3.10 out of development studio. Today we are releasing 3.10 version executable. If it turns out to be stable then official release will follow.

There are not many new features in 3.10. We have mostly tried to get bugs out. :)

Some new features:

We released next development snapshot of Feedreader today. We fixed some bugs but the biggest news is that hopefully will Feedreader support non-utf8 encoded feeds now. Here I'm talking about Big5 (chinese) and other multibyte languages. Previously Feedreader only supported utf8 based multibyte languages. We are more than grateful if users who are reading this kind of languages can give us feedback.
 

We are proud to release Feedreader version 3.09 today. You can download it from Feedreader download page. New features and additions :

• Database cleansing
• Article synchronization between multiple computers
• Favorite icons support
• Save favorite articles to Archive
• Change font in Feedreader
• Newsbar
• Notification window fixes
• Article ratings / Attention data
• Other additions

More extensive discussion about new features is here.

It's time to present normal installer for Feedreader version 3.09. We hope to finalize development of 3.09 this week and release stable version soon. At least for the moment the TODO list for 3.09 is empty ;). At the same time bugs can occur related to translations (eg some phrases are untranslated). This version does not include all the new translations yet, so please do not report about half working translations yet ;).

I would not suggest this development version for standard user who is afraid of some possible bugs.
We really need your feedback about new bugs that we may somehow introduced while adding new features. Please just post them here. :)

Some minutes ago we released yet another development version EXE. Progress:

• Some users have requested the possiblity of changing Feedreader font (which is by default Tahoma). Now you can do it. Just add fontname=Verdana to feedreader.ini and you get Feedreader with Verdana font.
• There was also problem with notification window position then screen resolution is changed (using laptop with external monitor). We somehow tried to make Feedreader to support better the resolution change. It's not 100% ideal but better than old state.
• Yet another fix is done in notification window. Some users were confused about how they can move notification window around in desktop. Basically you had to click with mouse somewhere in notification window and drag it. But problem was that not all window regions did not support this dragging. Now you can drag notification window while clicking wherever you want.

After those development days it feels that we are nearing release of version 3.09. We will not add any big features into 3.09 any more. Things yet to be done are managing translations and do some testing. We will also try to release Feedreader installer as MSI package additionally to EXE setup package. If everything goes well then we will see release of 3.09 next week.

Time to update development version again.

• We finally added Favorite Icon support to Feedreader. We will not enabled it by default so you have to enable it from Advanced settings.
• We added configuration option "viewcount=????". You can use it if you want to change default article count that will be shown in article list. Default is 1000. You can make it larger or smaller. I remind you also that you can also change web view article limit. Default is 50 but if you add "webviewcount=???" to feedreader.ini then you can override it. Only thing is that bigger count makes application a little bit slower.
• We also fixed a little bit the archive function. Now you will not see inappropriate commands in archive folder popupmenu any more.

Once again we updated development version EXE.

This time the changes and additions are:

• Fixed bug with unreadcount that occured then moving articles to Archive
• Based on users wishes we added new configuration option "Never hide Starred articles" to Advanced Feedreader Options. If this configuration option is enabled then Starred news are visible even if they are with read status. This option only works if "Hide read news" is enabled.
  

There were many requests for possibility to clean up older articles from database. Finally we made it. So this is it - database cleansing.

If you let application clean up older articles then ALL articles that are:

• Older than the day count
• Are marked as read
• Are not marked as Starred
• Are not moved to Archive

are deleted from database.