FARR Plugin Request: RSS Reader

[theMastermind]

Hello everyone!

I've did a few searches and I haven't been able to find any, so I wanted to ask is it possible to create a plugin that would show rss feeds?
For example, you type in the box: rss sitename and in normal FARR dropdown list it would show latest rss feeds from that particular site. Clicking on a result would either open the news in default browser or if possible (I'm a beginner at this, so I just list out ideas) in FARR's browser window that's called by "igo" command (maybe even make it an option to pick between those two).

I know it's not really a thing a launcher should do, but I feel that it might be quite useful for checking out news, and if it actually can open them in FARR's browser, that would be a fast way of reading the news out. Or if there's possibility, some kind of showing the popup (on mouseover or hotkey) on that news would show the text of the article (limited by characters to just show what's the news about, or if it can take the full text, even better). To better explain this idea (at least to Trillian users), something that trillian does when you mouse over a link is that it shows a popup with only text from that website. Since not only news sites use rss feeds, I believe this can be useful in quite number of ways to be updated on things you want.

I hope I explained my idea well and that it can be done!
Thanks

[ewemoa]

I don't remember the details clearly, but IIUC phitsc's FarrWebMetaSearch plugin does some portion of what was described.

Have you had a look at that?

[theMastermind]

I've tried it, but it doesn't seem to work on most of the searches, only onelook has gave me some results so far (and even when it did, FARR froze for 3-4 secs). But my idea is still slightly different than that one, but then again, it might be expanded with that kind of search for specific topics. I thought of it as simple as typing rss [feedname] and get latest rss feeds from the site, as I explained from my first post.

But you're still not wrong, that plugin is in some parts similar to my idea after all.

[ewemoa]

If the author of the plugin sees this thread, may be he'll have some useful comments...

[tomos]

But you're still not wrong, that plugin is in some parts similar to my idea after all.

-theMastermind (November 05, 2013, 10:48 AM)

If the author of the plugin sees this thread, may be he'll have some useful comments...

-ewemoa (November 05, 2013, 08:50 PM)

maybe make a post in the plugin thread - they're sure to see it there

[phitsc]

The reason why most of the searches that come with FarrWebMetaSearch don't work is because FarrWebMetaSearch has a fundamental flaw: it gathers results by applying regular expressions on a web page's html. Unfortunately, a web page's html doesn't seem to be very stable (over time) In other words, when a web site provider changes their html (for whatever reason), these regexes become invalid or unusable and keeping them up-to-date would be quite a task I'm afraid.

That being said, FarrWebMetaSearch could be quite suitable for showing RSS feeds, because the RSS format is well-defined and never changes. Currently, FarrWebMetaSearch requires one file per site for definition. So to fulfill the OP's request, it would have to be changed / extended in such a way that it uses one definition file (defined for the RSS format) for many sites, as suggested by the OP. And then: reading is one thing, but you probably also want the functionality to mark items as read, to star items, to share items, etc. etc.

[theMastermind]

The reason why most of the searches that come with FarrWebMetaSearch don't work is because FarrWebMetaSearch has a fundamental flaw: it gathers results by applying regular expressions on a web page's html. Unfortunately, a web page's html doesn't seem to be very stable (over time) In other words, when a web site provider changes their html (for whatever reason), these regexes become invalid or unusable and keeping them up-to-date would be quite a task I'm afraid.

That being said, FarrWebMetaSearch could be quite suitable for showing RSS feeds, because the RSS format is well-defined and never changes. Currently, FarrWebMetaSearch requires one file per site for definition. So to fulfill the OP's request, it would have to be changed / extended in such a way that it uses one definition file (defined for the RSS format) for many sites, as suggested by the OP. And then: reading is one thing, but you probably also want the functionality to mark items as read, to star items, to share items, etc. etc.

-phitsc (November 07, 2013, 10:07 AM)

I understand, thanks for explaining it.
As for the last part, well, I'd be fine with it simply showing the newest feeds first, marking them as read or sharing them isn't really something I'd really need in the idea I've posted in the first post. Just a simple feed reader that gives the newest feeds when you type in "rss website", probably with an option of refresh rate or something like that if it's needed.