gali

I’ve been using Bloglines for a while now to keep up to date with RSS feeds and their associated sites, including news, webcomics, blogs and so on. It’s a great web application for organising feeds and keeping track of which articles are unread. It also has the added perk of grabbing the contents of feeds even when I’m offline, ready for me to read when I log in next.

The problem with Bloglines is that it’s buggy, occasionally failing to actually display feeds, and quite resource hungry for the browser such that mobile browsers – even on the powerhouse that is the N900 – struggle with it. It’s also not very finger friendly for the aforementioned device.

Therefore, I decided to put together my own tool that reproduces the functionality I enjoy from Bloglines, while being better suited to a mobile browser – including a certain amount of finger friendliness. It’s not quite finished yet, and the it doesn’t download any content when you’re offline, but I think I should at least offer a link to my project to the outside world.

And so, I present, GaliRSS (yes, it really needs a better name…)

Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, a handful of its features include (in no particular order):

• An AJAX driven interface – almost no reason to reload the page.
• Caching of feed content, so feed content can be read later even after it drops out of the feed itself. The cache is currently limited to up to 4 weeks of history.
• If a feed only offers excerpts of content, the actual content can be either loaded in a new browser window/tab, or in an iframe within GaliRSS – no need to leave the site if you don’t want to.
• Feeds can be organised into groups of similarly themed content, available from a sidebar (which can be collapsed or hidden entirely).
• Feed items can be ‘pinned’ to read later.
• The feed list can either show all unclicked (unread) items, or items from a single feed, or items from a group of feeds, or pinned items.
• A ‘cleanup’ button is provided to hide clicked items. Clicking it a second time will reveal them all again.
• Each feed is colour coded, with a ‘strong’ colour picked at random for each new feed. This colour can be changed easily.
• Usage of GaliRSS is quite customisable from the Settings page.

At present, it doesn’t support authenticated feeds, or feeds with a https:// url (ie. http:// only)

Note that it’s not entirely break-proof at the moment. I also couldn’t completely guarantee the security of it at this stage.

Comments are welcome, and I’ll probably keep working on it for a while yet – but it is provided with no official warranty or support for now.