Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Jim,

I think I've worked out what's happening. When you don't prefix the url with "http://" you get sent the IPv6 socket (which we can't handle - I guess the version of Ruby we have hasn't been compiled with support for it).

I can get all of those feeds to work when I prefix them with "http://". At least one (Slashdot) failed when prefixed with "Http://" (capitol H). "feed://" failed too. I'll file a bug about the scheme handling. Thanks a lot for pointing out this bug.

Note, that the lack of feedback/progress notification is bug #2270. At the moment, there can be a large wait (where nothing is visibly happening) while adding a feed. It's really compounded when adding a new feed and the feed is large.

Good luck, let me know how that works out.

Mark

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Bug #2278.

Mark

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Ah! So, I require patience! I did the http versus no http with Engadget, but not with the other links (I assumed from Engadget that it made no difference). You're right, the other three work. Man, I wonder what's so special about Engadget?

Anyhow, this is now working well enough for me to use it. I'll see if I can spend some time and see what's going on with Engadget in the next day or so. Thanks!

- Jim

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Are you sure it's not working with "http://" prefix?

"http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml" works for me (note that it's all lower case).

These bugs should be fixed in the next release, thanks.

Mark

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

I've just released version 0.0.8. With a little luck, this will be the last release before version 0.1 - woohoo!

From the release notes:

* Much improved feedback of when feeds are being updated - bug #2270
* When adding a feed, now get something back to the user as soon as possible to let her know something is happening - bug #2270
* Fixed a few scheme handling problems - bug #2278
* Now uses conditional GET requests for fetching the feeds (much better for bandwidth)
* Fixed the view menu article list status to correspond to the article list visibility(!)

Teaser: I've also got a working branch for offline viewing of full articles. This still requires some work and won't be released until around version 0.2, but I think it will be a very nice feature when it's complete.

Yis' aw ken whit ti dae wi' the bugs!

Mark

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

I have gone through and added a bunch of feeds to nibbles. I am wondering if there are any plans in the works to improve download speed?

I have basically the same feeds setup in claws-mail rss reader. In claws mail it takes about 2 minutes to update all my feeds and processor is about 50% used.

In Nibbles it takes over 1/2 hour and the processor was pegged at 100% the whole time.

In both cases I had not updated either one in about a week so they should have been downloading about the same number of items.

If there is any information I can provide or anything else I can try, please let me know.

Keep up the great work!

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

I just tried the latest version and I see downloads have improved a little bit but they still see to take a long time.

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Yes, although there [i]may[/b] be a couple of other things that I'd like to get sorted first.

Although I'd expect Claws to be a fair bit faster than Nibbles at parsing feeds (it's the parsing rather than the downloading that takes the time), that does seem like a long time for four feeds. Can you tell me what feeds you use, please?

For anyone interested: Nibbles uses a library called feed-normalizer (which uses several parsers - three in this case) to parse feeds and return them all in the same format. This isn'st the fastest method (and Ruby isn't the fastest language!), so it should be possible to speed it up.

Cheers,

Mark

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

I do have more than 4 feeds. I have not done an exact count but it is more in the 30+ range. I can send you the list if you want but I don't see any one feed causing the slow down, it just seems to take a while to process each feed.

Re: [TESTERS WANTED] Nibbles - a feed reader
 

Re-reading your posts, I see no mention of four feeds. I've no idea why I imagined that!

Currently, Nibbles uses Ruby libraries to parse the feeds, which is slow on the N8x0 devices. I chose to do it that way because it was simple to implement. I would like to use a much faster C library (perhaps the claws-mail one, perhaps the built in OSSO reader one, perhaps another) at some stage. However, I've not looked into it and it's likely to be quite a lot of work. In the meantime, I might be able to be a bit smarter about things and get some speedups.

There are some other things I'd like to do first, like downloading of full offline articles (and make a first proper release!), but I'll definitely look into it.

Thanks a lot, it's really good to hear how other people use the application.

Mark