Raggregator - my first widget
15 April 2006, 13:19
Hello!
Even if I am not a ((very) big) fan of the whole widgets idea, I saw the usefulness in using them for various quick info. Such as weather and news aggregation.
There are too many per-site widgets, and weather widgets.
The new Widgets competition organized by Opera motivated me to make this widget :) - who wouldn't want that PC? Therefore, I present you the Raggregator version 1. :D
Features:
- support for RSS 2.0 and Atom 1 feeds.
- I don't currently have support for all the 9 incompatible RSS versions.
- unlimited number of feeds.
- minimize any feed you want.
- few settings can be changed in the widget (if you edit js/settings.js): number of maximum entries per feed, entry summary length, default feeds, and scroll speed.
- easy internationalization. *All* strings are in js/messages.js. Any new translations will be gladly posted. I won't currently add the Romanian translation, I want to first finish the second version of the widget.
I have many new features planned for the second version:
- better support for more feed versions and formats (maybe not only RSS/Atom).
- the ability to show detailed information for each entry and each feed (beyond the "what's new at a glance"). Something like a ... full-featured feed aggregator: satisfying all my news feed aggregation needs.
- the "minimal mode" which will act like a news ticker (scrolling the title of the feed entries).
- per-feed settings: auto-update interval, number of entries to show, hide visited entries, hide in news ticker.
- maybe grouped entries, acting similar to Planet Planet. This would allow the user to make a single group in which they can add as many feeds as they want. All the feed entries would then be sorted by date, showing *all* of them as one. This is something I'd prefer in many cases.
- maybe title editing for each group, for each feed, so you can change the title provided by the author of the feed.
- some display settings, like show dates on/off, show summaries, colours, themes, font size, etc.
- the ability to reorder the feeds (move up/down).
- and more...
Based on the above ideas I want to have some really important structure changes. I want the widget to be *the* aggregator. :)
After finishing the second widget version ... I might make a site-version, not just a widget (something like the JavaScript RSS/Atom parser by TarquinWJ). I won't keep it Opera-only, *but* I won't do *any* compatibility-related changes. I'll just stick to the web standards (if Firefox doesn't support them, sorry). Internet Explorer is, without doubt, out of the discussion.
Have fun using the current version. I hope I'll have time to make the second version - the above ain't guaranteed. :P
Download the file: raggregator.zip.
I have submitted the widget to the competition today, in the very last minutes. Yes, I've been very busy: I worked on this widget only in the last couple of days.
The experience of making the widget was really interesting. Too bad there's no support for alert, confirm and prompt within widgets. I also found a bug: crash when using mouse gestures (in the latest weekly build). The bug seems to affect any widget and any page. One another, more serious, annoyance is in widgets you can't use the title attribute for any element to show a nice tooltip. Do we have to write our own tooltip scripts for anything simple?
Good luck to all participants in the competition.
P.S. All coding is done only by me. All design is done only by my twin brother.
Update (2006/05/03): To err is human. I was claiming this widget has support for Atom 2 feeds. There's no Atom 2. There's only Atom 1. Sorry guys. I don't know how I made this mistake, because I always knew there's only Atom 1.
I found out about this mistake only now because M. David Peterson from atom-syntax mailing list published a message asking Opera staff to fix the description of my widget.
I have contacted Gautam Chandna (from My Opera staff) and he has fixed the description (the widget file is OK, no need for updating).
For those wondering if I won the competition: no, I didn't.