Mmm, spycy

AmphetaDesk has started crashing on me every time I try to reload its webpage. I’ve been thinking for a while about trying another RSS aggregator, and this seemed like a good time to do it.

So what better place to start than Google? I’m not sure exactly what made me look for a Python aggregator–probably reading Mark Pilgrim‘s weblog has had some more-than-subliminal effect. I’d tried Straw and Peerkat before, but both had their problems: Straw is heavily GNOME 2 dependent, and Peerkat didn’t handle newer RSS feeds. (I’ve since upgraded to GNOME 2 via RedHat 8, but Straw requires more libraries than I care to attempt to find or install.)

Oh yes, the Google search. I came across this post which pointed to Mark Pasc‘s notes, which in turn led to SpycyRoll (aka Pyblagg). It’s kind of similar to AmphetaDesk in that it’s a browser-based tool, but that’s about it. For one, it only runs periodically, instead of continuously. It’s forgiving of RSS errors (mostly; more later) via Mark Pilgrim’s ultra-liberal RSS parser. It caches its output page rather than regenerating the content at each reload. And, also via Mark’s parser, it seems to Do The Right Thing when it retrieves feeds by respecting and using ETags, If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since and User-Agent headers and gzip encoding, which is better than AmphetaDesk’s hand-rolled (but fairly effective) way.

Which isn’t to say it’s perfect. While the parser is tolerant of errors, the code to handle the values retrieved isn’t particularly forgiving. Of the thirty-some feeds I read, three couldn’t be read and so were ignored; I’ve worked around the two underlying problems with the little bit of Python I’ve learned in the last month (mostly from Mark Pilgrim again, this time via Dive Into Python). The other big problem I’ve found is that for feeds that don’t provide per-item dc:date values–i.e. most of the ones I read–it will continually recreate its caches of those items, throwing off the display and ordering of the items. I’ve worked around this too, but at the expense (I think) of breaking If-Modified-Since retrieval for those feeds.

I can live with SpycyRoll; after a couple of days, it already feels better to me than AmphetaDesk, for mostly intangible reasons. Neither one is what I ultimately want, but currently SpycyRoll is the more usable of the two for me, even ignoring AmphetaDesk’s crashes. (I haven’t been able to track down why AmphetaDesk is crashing, it just is; the shell reports a Broken pipe. I’m hesitant to report it to Morbus Iff without any further information or investigation, but let’s see just how good his ability to appear out of nowhere really is. <grin>)

There are still features I haven’t come across yet that I’d like to see in a browser-based aggregator. I want to be able to remove some items without reading them while making others sticky. I want headline, compact and expanded views, and mixed-feed and single-channel modes. (The kitchen sink would be nice, too.) To my way of thinking, these would be best accomplished using a combination of server-style commands (à la AmphetaDesk’s Add New Channel and My Settings pages) and DOM manipulation on top of the functionality of SpycyRoll. As Morbus Iff suggests (in another context), these are things better handled by limited-purpose shell utilities instead of a monolithic single application. I’m going to try to add some of these things to SpycyRoll in the next few days… wish me and my not-so-mad Python skillz luck….