Habari Xenu

Neat HX trick to run update in background while reading headlines

2006-02-13T18:06:38Z

One of the most requested features of HX is the ability to read headlines from your news sources while an 'Update Feeds' is running in the background. This is quite difficult to implement because JavaScript - the language in which HX is written - does not have thread support. I got this email this morning from a HX user:

i have a little trick to read feeds while they are updating: simply run TWO Habari, in two different tab ie, while in the first one they update, you can
read the second one.

I hope this can be useful for someone (with many feeds)

Timendum

This is a very neat hack. However, I have NOT tested this. So be careful when you try it out because it might run up bad credit on your credit cards, run away with your significant other, leave the toilet seat up or other unspeakable things.

[Announce] v1.0.3 of Habari Xenu Released

2005-12-20T21:19:58Z

Version 1.0.3 of Habari Xenu has been released.

Install Version 1.0.3 from openscroll.org (http) (right click and save-as and open locally from hard disk)
Install Version 1.0.3 from mozdev.org (http)

fr-FR Localization (thanks to Babelzilla)

Bug 12498 (The Feeds sidebar will always restore at his
original size) fixed

Bug 12431 (Exporting OPML doesn't seem to work) fixed

Bug 11903 (No support of Atom 1.0) fixed

Bug 10921 (Settings edit widow does not close at Finish) fixed

[Announce] Habarixenu 1.0.2 released

2005-12-05T01:06:56Z

Announcing the release of Habarixenu v1.0.2. This is a bug fix release where two problems in Firefox 1.5 have been fixed.

Grab yours from Openscroll (right click, save as, open locally).

Update: Link fixed.

[Announce] Habari Xenu 1.0.1 released

2005-11-18T19:31:17Z

Announcing the release of Habari Xenu v1.0.1.

Works on both Mozilla 1.8a and Firefox 1.5rc.
Bulgarian localization.
Request time out feature when doing 'Update Feeds'.
Should work with GMail Atom feeds.

Grab yours from Mozdev or Openscroll.

Announcing Version 0.9.6 Release Candidate 2

2005-05-19T12:50:30Z

Announcing the availability of Version 0.9.6 Release Candiate 2. Now works with version 1.8a (trunk) of the Mozilla suite. Previous versions had a problem with Mozilla suite trunk.

[Announce] Habari Xenu 0.9.5 and 0.9.6rc1

2005-04-27T12:37:20Z

Announcing the release of a stable 0.9.5 version. Changes include:

When viewing Icons+Text, the HX button in the toolbar now does not take up too much space.

Separators in bookmarks are handled better in the subscriptions list tree.

A minor bug where HX didn't do well with feeds containing only one item has been fixed.

The last visit date timestamp is now properly set.

A new option has been added to open the first feed on start up.

Also announcing the release of a development version 0.9.6rc1. Added the ability to set a time out for fetching/checking feeds.

Note: Link to 0.9.6rc1 fixed.

Where in the world is all the news chatter?

2005-04-21T04:15:03Z

"Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.

Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance."

They also have a nice RSS feed

Gmail Atom Feeds

2005-01-10T09:46:13Z

Idly viewing the source of Gmail I stumbled across the link to a user's gmails as Atom feed. Cool!

An Analysis of Habari Xenu development

2004-12-21T10:02:33Z

Version	Size (Bytes)	Release Date
0.6.0	80,210	05/06/04
0.6.5	287,116	05/25/04
0.7.0	257,686	08/03/04
0.7.1	116,072	08/10/04
0.7.2	104,325	08/11/04
0.7.3	88,613	08/11/04
0.8.0	95,504	08/19/04
0.9.0	104,215	10/09/04
0.9.1	100,342	11/10/04
0.9.2	90,994	11/15/04
0.9.3	93,738	11/21/04
0.9.4	93,621	12/12/04

Average	126,036

The development of HX started off with a decently-sized 80kB version 0.6.0. Versions prior to this were developmental versions that were never released. There was no feed management UI in v0.6.0. A settings editor was introducted for the first time in 0.6.5. That is why you see a leap in size to 287kB. v0.7.0 was mainly a bug fix version. BY v0.7.2 I had moved to using the bookmarks to store and manage the feeds. Settings editor was considerably re-tooled. IIRC, FeedParser was also being incorporated around this time.

Since then, it is nice to see that we have stabilized at HX being around (but less than) 100kB. I hope it stays this compact at least till a stable v1.0.

[Announce] Habari Xenu v0.9.5 Release Candidate 1 Released

2004-12-21T09:12:10Z

Announcing the availability of v0.9.5 Release Candidate 1 which is a quick fix of 8519.

[Announce] Habari Xenu v0.9.4 released

2004-12-13T05:27:14Z

Announcing the release of Habari Xenu v0.9.4. Updates in this release:

Parsing of blogspot Atom feeds corrected. (Bug 8110)

Bug 8363 fixed. Use top two links for timestamping.

Debugging alert message causing Bug 8176 on some Atom feeds removed.

Altering of User Agent string when fetching feeds is now optional (turned off by default). This was causing problems behind some proxies.

Test drive your copy today.

[Announce] Habari Xenu v0.9.3 released

2004-11-22T02:39:41Z

Announcing the release of Habari Xenu v0.9.3. Changes in this version:

'Subscribe' item in Context menu now optional (and off by default)

Help -> Version

'Subscribe' in context menu works now on both links and hyperlinked images

Custom stylesheets through userContent.css

TARGET now set to _blank instead of _new. This makes opening new tabs on Firefox work correctly

Download your copy here

Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed

2004-11-20T11:19:10Z

Came across this article on Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed. I am going to follow the techniques suggested in this article to optimize Habari Xenu's speed this weekend.

[Announce] HX 0.9.2 released

2004-11-15T09:49:06Z

I have uploaded version 0.9.2 of Habari Xenu to mozdev.org. It will take a day or so for the mozdev.org mirrors to catch up. In the meantime, you can download your copy here. Save it to disk and open it from disk to launch installation.

Updates:

Import/Export OPML fixed
Easy subscription to feeds through right clicking on link and selecting 'subscribe'

[Announce] Habari Xenu 0.9.1 released

2004-11-10T05:27:48Z

Announcing the release of version 0.9.1 of Habari Xenu. Updates in this version include:

International encoding problem solved
OPML import/export support
Edit feeds opens only feeds instead of all of bookmarks
Preliminary 'Update All' and 'Catchup' support
Minor copy changes
Parser consolidation
Sensible default feeds for first time users

Grab your copy today.

Firefox 1.0 RC2 has a sort of a news aggregator

2004-10-06T17:19:43Z

According to this, Firefox 1.0 RC2 has a new feature called Live Bookmarks. Here is how it is described:

"You can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds in your Bookmarks. When you visit a page that advertises a RSS feed by using a <link> tag, a RSS icon will appear in the status bar. Click it to view a list of feeds the page is offering. Click one to subscribe - this adds a Bookmark Folder that contains all the recent posts from the feed."

I just tested it and here are my thoughts:

The live bookmark is just like any other bookmark that is saved in bookmarks.html except it has a FEEDURL attribute whose value is the link to the news feed.
The best way to use the news aggregator seems to be through opening the sidebar tab that shows bookmarks.
Atom (At least LJ Atom feeds) feeds also seem to work.
Only the headlines are fetched and displayed as individual bookmarks under the feed's folder. Unlike with HabariXenu and many other news aggregator summaries of stores are not displayed. This is a major PITA. Perhaps in the future they will do this onmouseover the bookmark.

Should I even bother porting HX to Firefox if there is a built-in news reader-ish thinggy?

thaths

[Announce] Habari Xenu 0.8.0 released

2004-08-19T07:13:59Z

Announcing the release of Habari Xenu 0.8.0. Grab it from here.

Changes in this version:

Atom feed support
Improved parsing. Most feeds should now work
Settings editor error checking
Automagical configuration of tabbed browsing for use with HX
Feed date/time displayed for some feeds
Restart of browser not recessary for settings to take effect

Known issues:

Boingboing display fubared

RSSCalendar.com

2004-08-17T06:21:33Z

RSSCalendar.com

A cool on-line calendar which exports your calendar entries to your friends in RSS. Yet another "feed" for catching up through Habari Xenu.

Version 0.7.0. Released

2004-08-04T09:51:58Z

Habari Xenu version 0.7.0 is now released. It now works with windows.

Expect the following in the next version:

Improved feed parsing (RSS is a bitch)
Support for atom feeds
Unistalla support

Share and enjoy!

Google mulls RSS support

2004-06-11T04:27:25Z

Google mulls RSS support:

"Google is considering renewing support for the popular RSS Web publishing format in some of its services..."

This is great news for RSS news aggregators like Habari Xenu.

[Bug] HabariXenu problems on Windows

2004-05-31T07:10:22Z

My development platform is Linux and I hardly ever go into Windows. So I never even tested HabariXenu on a Windows machine. I have been getting bug reports about HX not running properly on Windows. Now that I have Windows installed on another partition, I am going to test HX on Windows this weekend and release a new version beginning of next week.

Thaths.

Version 0.6.5 of Habarixenu available for download

2004-05-25T05:29:41Z

I have just uploaded HabariXenu v0.6.5 to the server. It will take a day or so to propogate to all the mozdev.org mirrors. In the meantime, you can download it from here (right-click, save link target as...).

Whats New

Better feed parsing.
Update Interval is settable by user.
Cosmetic changes.
Better error messages.

Known Issues

Some feeds still don't parse well.

Version 0.6.0 available for download

2004-05-07T06:07:46Z

After almost 6 months of not working on this piece of software a torn ligament in my foot gave me the time to finally sit down and do many of the things I have been meaning to do with it.

I have uploaded version 0.6.0 to the HabariXenu Project page on Mozdev. The download mirrors have not sycned the XPI file yet. In the meantime, download from this link. Note: The MIME type is not set correctly on the server. So you have to download it to your hard disk and open it from there to initiate installation.

Updates in this version include:

Installs under a user's chrome (instead of system-wide chrome)

Integration with FeedParser - This gives us the ability to deal with Atom feeds in the next version.

Uses bookmarks to store the feeds heirarcy. This means you to use the bookmarks editor to edit your feeds and even put them into categories and sub-categories.

Known issues:

FeedParser barfs on parsing some feeds like Kuro5hin, Fark, Linux Weekly News. I need to hack FeedParser over the weekend.
When a fresh feed is downloaded from the news source, there is a slight delay of 1-5 seconds between the click and news items appearing on the right hand side.

Screenshots available here

Version 0.5 available for download

2003-11-19T13:16:35Z

Download and save this XPI file (by right clicking). Open it from File... Open and the installation will kick off. Restart the browser and you should see 'Habari Xenu' under the 'Tools' menu.

Known bugs and issues:

You can only install and use this if you have write access to dir_where_mozilla_is_installed/chrome.
There is a weird problem with asynchronous download of a feed. I.e., you click on a news source, the RSS is downloaded, yet, the news displayed is from the last fetch. If you click on another item and then click back on the one you clicked earlier, the newly downloaded feed is displayed. Patches welcome.
The feeds editor is finicky. So go easy on it.
Make frequent backups of dir_where_mozilla_is_installed/chrome/habarixenu/content/rssfeeds.rdf. That is where your feed list is stored.
Installation has been tested only on Linux Mozilla 1.5. Would welcome WinDOS installation reports.

How to hack?

I welcome your code contributions. Edit dir_where_mozilla_is_installed/chrome/habarixenu/content/*.js and *.xul and send me patches after testing.

More screen shots

2003-11-08T01:01:56Z

I have been hacking on Habarixenu. I am now finished with the graphical design of the feeds editor. Now it is a matter of adding code to actually do the magic. And I have to build an installer (which is not a big deal). Then we would be ready for a release.