Tom Morris

I'm an ex-NewsRiver user. A while back, I switched over to Bloglines instead of NewsRiver. Bloglines has some useful advantages - it works seamlessly with my Palm Pilot.

I still buy the NewsRiver concept though. I was pleased to see that Dave added some new features to it. The "no repeating headlines" thing doesn't work for me, because a few blogs render untitled entries with a '#' sign as the title. Similarly, quite a few comments feeds (eg. CoComment) list comments by blog entry title, and so it doesn't quite work. It would work if I could nominate feeds that are exempt.

I've switched back. Really seamless switchover. Just grab my Bloglines OPML feed, import it and hit scan. I remember why I switched over to NewsRiver in the first place, and that's because it actualy lacks a feature that I think important not to have. That's the "Mark as new" function that Bloglines has.

I find that there are interesting stories that grab my interest but which I don't actually blog. Why? Because I save them "for later". And then there builds up this little glut of stories.

NewsRiver makes me read the stories, rather than just click through them. It's very strange that a feed reader that is simpler and has less features actually means that you are more likely to blog a story. A lot of technology people don't get that very subtle changes can affect usability enormously.

I think that the change in RSS reader has changed what and how I blog. Is there a difference between, say, WordPress, Movable Type and the OPML Editor? Of course. And those differences produce different types of blog.

How am I going to replicate the functions that NewsRiver gives me on the mobile platform? Easy. In NewsRiver, Dave has included all the code for his new mobile news sites - BBC River, NY Times River etc. (if you use OPML Editor, update, and then you can inspect the code by jumping to newsRiverSuite.viewNewsItemsPda)

But it's on the client side. It's cool that it's there, but it's in the wrong place for me. I want it on my server. So I'm going to write something to grab the entries from my NewsRiver and upload them. That way I can read it on my Palm Pilot and mobile too. Basically, once I've downloaded the news, it'll then push the NewsRiver HTML up to the server. There'll also be a nice button that you can push to upload the files manually.

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Kosso has asked whether it's possible to post to opml.org via MetaWeblog API. Of course not! You wouldn't want that, would you?!

If you want to work out what the methods are on the opml.org server, you can find them by jumping to opmlCommunityServerRpcHandlers (presumping you've got opmlCommunityServer.root - I have it for "training purposes"). The methods are as follows: checkPassword, deleteFile, getFilesChangedSince, getServerInfo, ping, registerUser and saveFile.

If you wanted to implement a MetaWeblog API interface for the OPML Editor blogs, here's how you'd do it (for metaWeblog.newPost):

1. Get the data from the request.

2. Work out the data and resolve all the time-zone issues (which are plentiful with the OPML Editor, but invisible unless you live anywhere other than the East Coast).

3. Try and get the relevant date file from the server (in PHP, using file_get_contents()).

4. If the file exists, read it in.

5. If the file doesn't exist, make a new one.

6. Add the blog entry to the file based on certain preset logic (ie. untitled entries at the top, titled entries at the bottom, organised by date & time etc.)

7. Upload the OPML file to the server.

8. Produce a new RSS file and upload that too, making sure to respect the various quirks of the Editor.

9. Hack the desktop editor to make sure that the changed files are downloaded. I'd do this by storing a variable with the last time the Editor sent any request (a sort of global touch variable), and then tying that together with the getFilesChangedSince function on opml.org.

10. WARN USERS TO BACK ALL THEIR CRAP UP AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE! Why? Because a process as complex as this would be likely to screw things up, and we absolutely wouldn't want to lose data.

11. Send a response back saying "all done, chuck" (or the XML equivalent).

Is this possible? Oh, absolutely. Mapping newPost would be the simplest to do. editPost and getPost would be a bit of an arseache, because there's no simple way of referring to posts on OPML.org - date, time and (sometimes) titles, but both are possible. I'd love to do it - I'd do it in PHP using either Keith or Simon's XML-RPC libraries. The payoff for this would be huge! I could post my brief blog snippets from my Palm Pilot and from sites like digg and Flickr. You could easily do things like have scheduled posts. It would be very cool, it's just a lot of coding. It's not that bad though - presuming they let me take my laptop on board my flight in a week or so, I'll be able to code for seven hours without any interruptions!

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