Liferea – My Favorite Linux Feed Reader in Ubuntu

Liferea is currently my favorite feed reader for Linux. It has a simple interface, supports tray docking and is easy to use compared to other alternatives.

Liferea supports subscription from RSS and ATOM feeds for my favorite blogs and news site. It gives me the flexibility by letting I manage my feeds individually, or grouping it using the folder feature.

Podcast and Enclosure Support
Another feature that I appreciate the most is the enclosure support, which is also used primarily in podcasting.
liferea screenshot

Liferea can manage your podcast subscription as easily as dedicated podcast application. All you need to do is to configure Liferea to automatically download enclosures and you can listen to your podcast using your favorite audio player, provided you configured Liferea to launch your favorite audio player in its preference of course.

Screen Scraper: Web to RSS

Finally, Lifearea has one feature that most feed reader lacks…it has website screen scraper feature that lets you subscribe updates from your favorite website that do not provide syndication feeds for some reason. Here’s the list of user-made scraper scripts that you can use together with Liferea to ease up your feed subscriptions.

For Ubuntu users, Liferea is available in your repository, you just need to use Synaptic Package manager to install Liferea to your computer.

Liferea official website can be reached at liferea.sourceforge.net

[tags]linux,liferea,feed reader, rss reader, atom, rss, syndication[/tags]

Planned Improvements on PHP FeedCreator-ppt (1.8.0)

Sorry for the delay caused by my busy study schedule.

Now I would like to outline the planned improvements for the next feedcreator-ppt release 1.8.0 :

  • Improve ATOM 1.0 support
  • Fix HTML encoded description feature in ATOM and RSS feeds
  • Add manual, documentations and more examples
  • Add function to change timezone and encodings easily
  • Add standard podcast support
  • Fix various bugs in PIE,RSS,ATOM feed format

The new release of Feedcreator-ppt (1.8.0) is expected to come out in end of February 2007. You can get the latest development release from Feedcreator SVN server

Any Suggestions?
If you have any suggestions, feature request or bugs, please report them at Feedcreator Tracker at Sourceforge or put a comment here.

When you do, please include pieces of code that produces the feed, the resulting xml file itself and the version of feedcreator you’ve tested against (1.7.2-ppt or SVN) for easy debugging.

I would like to thank KosherJava and various other individuals that has submitted bug reports to improve feedcreator. Thank you, and and have a great Christmas holiday.

[tags]feedcreator,rss,atom,xml,feed,feeds[/tags]

Shop smarter – Grab Coupons for Online Gift Shopping

I’m going to let you know previously untold secret: I’m a shop addict. I’ve became one ever since I learn how to do online transaction from a friend. Since then, I never missed an opportunities to grab whatever stuff that I want to be through the Internet, provided that it is well priced.

If you’re smart enough, you can even get lower prices when you’re shopping online. Some online stores has a feature called ‘Online Coupon codes‘ which when entered, will give you special discount for the things you buy online. These coupon codes are given away by retailers as a way to promote their products on the internet.

Where can I find These Coupons?
One such place that you can find coupon codes is from Ncnatural Coupon Resources, a daily updated directory of coupon codes. The website is organized in such way that users will be able to locate coupons quickly without much hassle.

For a geek like me, I find coupons from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are most interesting as I like to read a lot of books.

With Christmas just around the corner there will be a lot of shopping going on and I’m sure that you’ll save a lot on online shopping with these coupons :)

[tags]shop,e-commerce, online shopping, coupon, coupon codes,tips,amazon[/tags]

XSL Hacking for Photo Gallery

I’ve hacked XSL template for my photo gallery RSS feeds. Not much of a sight, but I’ve definitely learn a lot of things about XSLT transformation and its quirks, lol.

Well, now at least my Photo Gallery feeds is much more readable to an average human being. Oh, I’ve updated my gallery with several more photos for your viewing pleasure.

Here’s the source code of my XSL template, free for public use : RSS Photo Template

Yahoo Media RSS extension (mRSS) and Photo Galleries

I just realised that Yahoo Media RSS extension (mRSS) has enabled me to view my photo gallery in slide show in My Yahoo!.

This is because I’ve included Yahoo mRSS extension as part of my experimental Coppermine RSS/ATOM plugin.

You can see the screenshot of “My Yahoo!” here when it reacted on RSS feed that contain mRSS extension. The normal RSS/ATOM feed subscription is on the right, while the mRSS-enabled feed is in slideshow mode.

Other photo gallery that supports Yahoo mRSS is Flickr

You can get Yahoo Media RSS extension specifications here : http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/mrss

Microsoft release specs for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)

Microsoft has released Simple Sharing Extensions, a new extension to RSS which helps users to syncronise each others extension. Microsoft has release SSE specs under the Creative Commons License (Attribution-ShareAlike) 2.5 .

Microsoft claimed that it has modelled the SSE based on the structure of Lotus Notes, which denotes that Lotus Notes “notefile” is analogous to RSS ‘feeds;’ and Lotus Notes ‘notes’ could be analogous to RSS ‘items’.

Hope that this extension would extend the usefulness of RSS feeds just like other extensions like Yahoo mRSS and dublin core module do. I would also love that people would use the ATOM 1.0, functionality in much of their daily work, as I read the specs that there’s much potential to be exploited in the syndication format.

[Source]
Microsoft RSS SSE extension spec : http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/