nion's blog

Yay, newsbeuter 2.0 was just released! I am way too lazy to summarize all the new features and bugfixes, It's just to many of them. Here is the changelog:

Added more flexible dialog handling
Improved position handling in article list (fixes #112; thanks to Isaac Good)
Fixed a lot of bugs (#102, #111, #117, #130, #131).
Added ability to specify a list of OPML URLs when using OPML as URL source.
Added config option "keep-articles-days" to optionally keep articles only for a limited number of days.
Added config option "bookmark-interactive" to indicate that the configured bookmarking command is interactive.
Don't display authentication information in URLs (fixes #121).
Replaced mrss with new RSS/Atom parser.
Added ability to search for text from the article view.
Added basic support for Yahoo Media RSS.
Made article view pager configurable.
Improved HTML rendering of links and underlined and bold text.
Added ":source" commandline command to (re)load configuration files.
Implemented "pipe-to" key to pipe articles to external commands.
Implemented backtick evaluation for configuration files.
Extended filter language with "between" operator.
Added "age" attribute for articles to filter them for relative age (in days).
Extended "set" commandline command to toggle boolean variables and reset configuration variables of all types to their default.
Added ability to configure local files as feeds.
Added a "random-unread" key to go to a random unread article.
When opening articles from a search result dialog, make search phrase stand out in article view.
Persist commandline and search history.
Implemented commandline completion.
Improved help dialog so that it now shows unbound functions.
Added ability to sort feed list and article list by interactively choosing the sort method.
Improved and extended conditional HTTP download handling.

The full release annoucement by ak is available on: http://newsbeuter.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/newsbeuter-20-released/

Also just uploaded the package to Debian unstable.

Quoting ak:

Exactly 650 days after I started developing newsbeuter, I declare newsbeuter officially “finished”, in the sense that it contains all the features that I wanted to have in it. It was a great effort, hours and hours of programming, debugging and answering support requests, but it paid off, and the result is probably the greatest console-based RSS feed reader that ever existed.

newsbeuter also has its own website from now on, located on: http://www.newsbeuter.org/.

I consider newsbeuter really the perfect newsreader and as feature rich as the equivalent for mail: mutt.

The main improvements for me in 1.0 are

• highlighting of text defined by regular expressions


• search function in the help dialog (newsbeuter really got quite a lot of commands in the meantime)


• reset-unread-on-update option which enables you to get updates on specific blog entries if they change in the future

Besides those features newsbeuter glances with a long list of other features:

• podcast support


• ssl support


• auto-reload


• only display unread blogs


• bookmark support


• specify article format strings


• key binding support


• external html rendering support


• article filtering based on regular expressions aka killfile


• macro support


• proxy support


• ompl export/import


• tagging of blogs


• article saving


• custom filter scripts


• on-the-fly variable editing (we know that from mutt, vim, etc.)


• bloglines synchronisation


• query feeds (meta feeds on top of the feeds specified in URLs selected by a filter expression)


• usual key bindings to mark as read/unread etc.

Which command line rss feed reader can mess with this while also providing a good, intuitive user interface we know
from other quality text-mode applications like vim and others? ;-P
Thank you ak for developing this excellent piece of software!

The Google Watch Blog writes about accessing Google via some command line on http://projects.felipc.com/gcl/.

Ever heard about using smart bookmarks?

Here I talked about my idea to use a textfile to handle bookmarks and the wmiiplumb (now wmiipsel tool) to write them to a file.
Julias Plenz did some modifications and now I adapted the script to wmii-current (aka wmii-3 in a few days).

Download the new bookmark script on:
http://nion.modprobe.de/bookmark.sh

So far so good, now I took over garbeams idea to use it with wmiimenu to display them and its really a pleasure.
wmiimenu is a generic, highly customizable, and efficient menu for the X Window System, originally designed for wmii(1). It supports arbitrary, user defined menu contents.
The cool thing is that I call a keybinding in my WM now and I can type parts of the URL or TITLE to get the link and press ENTER. Then opera opens it in a new tab.
Show me one bookmark handler in a browser which offers you soo much comfort
This simple thing is done with:


#!/bin/sh

TEMP=`cat $HOME/bookmarks.txt | wmiimenu | sed -e 's/.\+\ :\(.\+\)$/\1/g'`
/usr/bin/opera -newpage "$TEMP"

I hate the bookmark option of firefox & opera. With some thousand bookmarks they are difficult to maintain and
the browser becomes slow if you want to open them. I want to have all bookmarks in a single file on which
I can operate with grep and other UNIX-tools.

For this I wrote a little shell script, get it on:
http://nion.modprobe.de/bookmark.sh

Mark an URL in your browser and then execute the script. The script uses the URL, downloads it, parses title
and writes the page title and URL into a file. It gets the URL using wmiiplumb from the
window manager wmii.

wmiiplumb only prints selected strings in X to the standard output and can be
used with every window manger, it only depends on the Xlibs.
For those who have no wmii installation get a copy of wmiiplumb on:
http://nion.modprobe.de/wmiiplumb.c

and compile it with:
gcc -L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/include/lib -lX11 wmiiplumb.c

If you use wmii you can modify your ~/.wmii-$version/wmiirc
and for example add a line like:
kbind normal $MODKEY-b 'extern /home/nion/bin/bookmark.sh'

Now if you press ALT+b and an URL is selected it will grab the title and write it with URL to ~/bookmarks.txt
As a matter of course this can be used with other window mangers too.

Wiki2 is a shell which allows
you to browse wikipedia via you shell.

Just try it out by using sh wiki2
Another good possibility to make the wikipedia more luxurious is to use smart bookmarks
[via 256bit]

Mika posted this link on his bookmark place which seems to be very usefull to search on debian mailing lists.

Especially for people with crappy MUAs this could be a nice improvement of their web searching customs.

Firefox allows the use of so called "smart bookmarks".

With smart bookmarks you can make a bookmark, specify a placeholder and a keyword.
You can now type the keyword with a query string in the address bar and then...magic
Example:



The %s will be abbriviated with the specified query string.
With this example you can type bts $package in the address line and firefox will load:
http://bugs.debian.org/$package

Another usefull example is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

This will query wikipedia and will go to the description page.

For search queries there is also the nice plugin ConQuery.