Hello Brad,

Saturday, January 25, 2003, 3:28:57 AM, you wrote:

BCbbc> In no particular order:

Now that you have posted it to your weblog and Mark Pilgrim has
linked to it, I think there is no more excuse for me not to give an
official response to this. :-)

BCbbc> * Option for advanced users to assign a custom stylesheet (URL
BCbbc> or local file) for content panel. Perhaps even configurable at
BCbbc> the feed level -- say, why isn't a stylesheet URL part of the
BCbbc> RSS markup for this purpose? This would also give me the
BCbbc> ability to hide images on a per-feed basis.

Yes, this is already planned, and I will probably implement it quite
soon. There's quite a lot to gain with very little effort. :-)

Adding the stylesheet URL to the RSS feed itself is also a pretty
good idea, but for this to gain wide acceptance, efforts of me alone
will not be enough.

BCbbc> * Ability to re-order 'feed' list via drag-n-drop;
BCbbc> option to view 'feed' list in order of last updated (most
BCbbc> recently updated feeds would be shown at the top).

BCbbc> * Ability to group feeds together (this would require an outline
BCbbc> view/treeview component or something). ie: "Blogs", "News",
BCbbc> "Gaming" groups...

These two features will be the main focus of the version of
Syndirella after 0.91. They will require quite a lot of changes to the
feed list code, and I want to deal with the easy stuff before
embarking on the big changes.

BCbbc> * Publish/subscribe feed list to a site. Here's my usability issue
BCbbc> with Syndirella: I use on one machine at home and another at work.
BCbbc> But *I* am the same person reading and the newsfeeds are the same
BCbbc> too. The first thing I have to do when I go to the other machine
BCbbc> is to 'ctrl-m' through my feeds to clear them. Ideally, when I
BCbbc> shutdown Syndirella at the office, it would be nice if it could
BCbbc> post to a server of my choice my list of feeds and the read/unread
BCbbc> status. FTP access at a minimum. WebDAV would be nice too.

This is also a fairly common request, and I myself need this too, so
this will definitely be implemented quite soon. There are several
steps to enable this:

- store the MD5 hashes of read items in the OPML file;
- automatically write out the OPML file when the feed state has
changed;
- support loading the OPML from a HTTP location;
- support saving the OPML to an FTP location;
- automatically import an OPML file at Syndirella startup.

Not all of these items will go into 0.91, but I hope to implement at
least the first three of those in 0.91. FTP support will have to wait
for a while - you can't have everything at once. :-)

BCbbc> * A 'Mark ALL feeds as read' option would be nice.

That's pretty much trivial to implement, so this will go into 0.91.

BCbbc> * Grab the 'favicon.ico' from sites for display in the 'Feed' list
BCbbc> and address bar. When updating, change the icon to an animated
BCbbc> 'update' icon instead of adding '(updating)' to the feed name.

This is planned, but not for too soon - this is a purely "nice look"
feature, so I'd like to deal with substantial things first.

BCbbc> * Discovery for multiple feeds for a site.

This is obviously needed, but I don't know how soon I will implement
it. The RSS discovery code is hairy enough, and it will need more
straightening out before this feature becomes easy to add.

BCbbc> * Feed-level option to ignore updated RSS items (the ones that are
BCbbc> currently highlighted in blue).

I'd rather fix the updated item detection code so that it becomes
less eager to discover updated items. If the old and new items differ
only by whitespace or by HTML markup, this shouldn't cause the item to
be marked as updated.

BCbbc> * Minimize to tray with the 'Escape' key. User-configurable hot-key
BCbbc> for restoring from tray (mine would be Ctrl+Alt+S).

I'm not yet sure that it's a good idea to minimize to tray by Esc...
I'll think about that some more. And a configurable restore hotkey is
probably a good idea.

BCbbc> * Option to start up with Windows (yes, I know I can put it in my
BCbbc> 'Startup' group, but it should still be a program option).

This will definitely be an option in the installer. An option in the
Syndirella prefs dialog would be nice as well, but I consider it less
important.

BCbbc> * Option to start up minimized to tray.

Obviously needed, and trivial to implement. Coming soon.

BCbbc> * When the 'Feed' column has focus, using the arrow keys to navigate
BCbbc> should preserve focus to the 'Feed' column.

Pure bug. Coming soon.

BCbbc> * Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down navigates to previous/next item;
BCbbc> Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right navigates to previous/next feed? I'm all
BCbbc> for keyboard shortcuts.

Yes, that's probably a good idea. Coming sooner or later. :-)

BCbbc> * Local search through feeds. Option to restrict search to a single
BCbbc> feed or to search all feeds. Option to restict search by date.

This is definitely needed, but it will have to wait for a while. You
can't have everything at once.

BCbbc> * Option to filter feed display by date (only show items posted in
BCbbc> the last 1, 2, 3, etc. days/weeks). When filtering, empty feeds
BCbbc> shouldn't be listed in the 'Feed' column.

Is this really needed? Why?

BCbbc> * Regex support in web scraping. PLEASE!

The web scraping stuff is at a very rough state, and it needs quite
a lot of changes; regexp support is definitely one of them. However,
I'm not sure if I'll have time to do all these changes in 0.91. Maybe
not.

BCbbc> * Separate project files for SharpDevelop (I'm looking at this but
BCbbc> if someone else has done it, please share!).

Yes, these would be _very_ nice to have. My first attempt at
creating them failed; I'll look into this more.

BCbbc> * Integration with newsisfree.com? Perhaps even premium
BCbbc> newsisfree.com? I understand they have one of those newfangled
BCbbc> XML-RPC things that might make this easy.

A possibility to view the list of feeds in an external source
(newsisfree.com, moreover.com, the blogroll linked from an RSS feed,
the list of recently updated weblogs at weblogs.com, and so on) and to
subscribe to any of them is planned for a later version. Not too soon,
though.

BCbbc> * Pie in the sky: 'blog this' option that will let you post the
BCbbc> active item to your blog tool of choice (this would require Blogger
BCbbc> API/Metaweblog API integration). But failing that, some blog
BCbbc> tools have a feature that adds this option to the IE context
BCbbc> menu, that works too (Blogger and Movable Type do anyway).

I don't think that it really makes sense to post an item directly to
the weblog, without any intermediate editing. And I don't know of any
weblog clients which can receive the initial text of the post through
some API, let the user edit it and then post the edited text to the
weblog. So this will have to wait until something changes. :-)

And thanks a lot for your ideas!

--
Best regards,
Dmitry mailto:yole@...