A partial list of changes:

• Atom support; better RSS parsing.
• Tons of visual tweaks. New “light” CSS file by default; old “dark” file also included.
• Change ‘mark all read’ command so that it leaves ticked items alone.
• Support for per-feed update intervals and item expiration times.
• Fixed a database locking bug (I think).
• Add an index to the feed table; speeds up the feed list display by 5-10 fold.
• Quite a few other minor things — see the CHANGELOG in the tarball.

Here’s some screenshots of the new release:

Here’s the FeastOnFeeds-002tarball. Share and enjoy; questions, patches, feedback — genehack@genehack.org.

Better late than never: FeastOnFeeds-001 is available for download. Share and enjoy.

Requires a web server capable of running CGIs, Perl, and a whole raft of modules, most of which are so mindblowningly cool you should already have them installed. Has, like, installation instructions and everything, just like real software. Holler if you have questions or problems or (especially) patches.

And now I’m going to go think about the first things I want to add for the 002 release…

For the past week or so, I’ve been hacking on something I’ve been calling “Feast On Feeds” — a port of the Feed On Feeds PHP/MySQL server-side RSS reader to Perl/SQLite. At this point, it’s both less and more than a straight port: there are some things missing (no Atom support yet), and some new things (some color coding, the notion (stolen from Gnus) of “ticking” something as important so you can find it later). I should have a tarball up in the next couple of days, depending on when I get around to documenting the installation process a little bit better.

In case anybody is interesting in using this or hacking on it (yes, Raster, I’m looking at you…), here’s some screenshots to whet your appetite…

Still suffering from the cold. Elected to stay home from work and take things easy — also wanted to keep a bit of an eye on TheWife, who was still moving around like a gimp in the morning.

Since I had the time, I decided to start a project that I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head for some time: porting Feed On Feeds to Perl. I’ve been using Feed On Feeds for some time; it was the first aggregator that I found that fit my particular set of needs.

One reason for the port was to make it easier for me to add some features that I’ve been wanting (per-feed update intervals and the ability to save items in a ‘ticked’ state are at the top of the list). Another reason was to play around with the ultra-spiffy Class::DBI and SQLite; I’m going to be using them for a project at work, which means this qualifies as “research”. (I’m also thinking about ways to work those two topics into this summer’s BioPerl class, so I could tell myself that this was part of the prep work for that too…)

I’ve looked at the structure of the Feed On Feeds code before (and made some very minor tweaks to my local copy), so it was pretty easy to lay my stuff out in a similar fashion. (Jacking the JavaScript that handles marking individual items and letting the user change their state was probably the biggest time saver.) And of course, the combination of Class::DBI and Template Toolkit makes for some pretty rapid RAD, especially if you go with the XP-style “simplest thing that could work” method. Here’s a screen shot of how Feast On Feeds (that’s what I’m currently calling the project) looks so far:

There’s still quite a bit of work to do before I would consider releasing anything, but if I implement importing of the OPML that’s exported by Feed On Feeds, I could be eating my own dogfood here pretty quickly.