I just downloaded Habari Xenu and installed it (discovered via
- Built in advert blocking (or even better, use adblock's filter list). OK, I'm draconian, but I don't want to see any adverts. It's the principle of the thing. And I see the fark.com feed contains an ad for the feed provider.
- It's not really solving a problem… Firefox can subscribe to RSS feeds just fine and display them as live bookmarks. What I really want it for it to mash all the “blog” feeds into one huge data stream, sorted in reverse by time, just like an LJ friends page. That would actually be useful above what Firefox does. As is, it's just Yet Another Online Content Display Tool.
Oh, and I just discovered a bug. If I “edit feeds” and choose to open a feed in a new tab, the dialog stops updating when I click to other feeds. So I can't open more than one feed in a new tab per instance of the “edit feeds” dialog.
I know nothing. However I have the good fortune of having spectacular and intellegent friends, of which here is one (my friend recieving my RRS feed on his own HX) who responds:
“It's a pretty tall order to expect never to see any advertisements.
That said, I haven't seen any advertisements, including any on the
fark.com feed. I'm using adblock and as far as I can tell, it should
block advertisements in an rss feed as well. Are you using one of the
maintained lists of advert sources? Such as:
http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/
Keep in mind that adblock works by filtering based on keywords, such
as, don't fetch anything that comes from “adserver”. If there's
nothing about the name of the image that says “I'm an advertisement”,
it's going to slip through. If something does slip through, click
“adblock” in the lower right and it will bring up a dialog to add a
filter.
Is HX necessary? Well, if you like FF's live bookmarks, that's fine.
I never did. But I do like HX. Open source is about having choice.
Your complaint about not mashing all the feeds into one stream is one
I've seen before, and it's well taken. (I wouldn't want this, but I
know many people who do.) As far as I know, none of the RSS readers
integrated into Firefox will do this. It's not an easy problem to
solve from within FF, especially since some feeds (like fark) don't
put a time stamp on their entries.
As for the bug you mention, I didn't really understand what you were
saying. At least, I couldn't find a problem based on what I thought
you were saying. But you can check here:
http://tinyurl.com/dq45w ”
(http://livejournal.com/users/_skye_)
I'm not talking about advert images – they're adequately blocked by adblock as you say. I'm talking about text items inserted into the feed as if they were news stories, but they are adverts. The fark example is be “This RSS feed powered by pluck.com” with a link. Something similar to adblock could filter such elements out of the feed.
I looked at various RSS feeds and I realize that timestamps are an optional feature. But I can imagine a system whereby for feeds without timestamps, items get timestamped client side according to when they first appeared on the feed.
HX has the potential to be useful and I'm going to stick with it. I've had it installed for less than 24 hours so I'm still forming an opinion. At the moment, like a lot of OSS, it strikes me as something where many features were added because the programmer thought it would be cool to write, rather than solving a problem or fulfilling a need. I recognise this because I'm immediately thinking, “it would be cool to write this.” 🙂
(http://livejournal.com/users/elbeno)