Re: is there a truly offline feed reader?
On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:09:21 -0700
Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:25:49PM +0200, Leonardo Canducci
> <leonardo.canducci@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> > Liferea is not, at least when a feed shows only a few lines and
> > links to the true article, and so other popular readers. AFAIK
> > Straw was the only one truly offline reader but it's broken (in
> > sid). Even google reader + gears can't fetch articles linked from a
> > feed like that: http://osnews.com/story/22145/Linux_2_6_31_Released
> > which has only a small part/abstract of the article. In such case
> > you have to be online to read the full article even when all feeds
> > are synced/refreshed. Am I missing something or there is no such
> > software?
>
> I finally used rss2email when I had this problem. I don't think it
> handles situations where the author hid the article behind a link,
> though.
I was intrigued by the problem, and as a learning exercise I decided to
write an offline feed aggregator. I'm continually amazed at how easy
it is with Perl to get other people to do the heavy lifting for you
(thanks Larry and all the other Perl conributors)!
And so I present to you Foffl (Alpha) v0.1:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/foffl/
It's not yet the most usable thing around, but it does seem to work, at
least on the dozer or so example feeds (RSS and Atom) that I've tested
it on. Feedback (no pun intended) welcome!
[Note that this helps for the case where the feed doesn't include the
full entry content, but the webpage pointed to by the feed's link
does. It won't help for the case where the linked webpage itself
doesn't contain the full content, just a second link to that content.
Accomplishing that would seem to require scraping, a tedious task that
must be done separately for each site, and yielding very fragile
results.[
Celejar
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