Introduction

pyferea is my solution to this email that I posted to the debian-users list in 2011. I was fed up with there being no sane RSS reader in existance that could just render some RSS entries in a fast and simple fashion.

Quick Start

Create a feeds.yaml (you can copy feeds.yaml.example) and then run:

$ python pyferea.py

Naming

It is called pyferea (python feed reader) for now as I was inspired by the layout of liferea (linux feed reader). I guess I'm just too lazy to come up with another name but suggestions are welcome. Pyferea is just the first thing that sprang to my mind when I had to give the sourcecode directory a name and I didnt change it since.

Purpose

I might really overlook something out there but everytime I checked there was no sane RSS feed reader out there that would please me. I did not think that I would require much. Just three panes for feeds, entries and content, keeping record of unread entries and rendering content in a browser. Liferea came close but was poisoned by feature bloat (as many others... especially gnome dependencies) and major slowness. On top of that it created a new feed entry everytime I accidentally drag&drop something. I call all of those bugs and they never got fixed. Pyferea does just what I want, is simple, DE agnostic (uses python and gtk) and fits in about 1000 lines of code.

Pyferea is for you if you want:

• an offline feed reader
• no gnome, KDE, mono dependencies
• no rss reader as a browser plugin
• not terminal based, hence webbrowser for rendering

Bugs

Pyferea as it is now is enough for my daily use but there are still some issues that need to be fixed: the back/forward functionality of the browser must be fixed in certain cases (i seldomly use it) and the text in the addressbar, title and tabtitle must be synced. I will fix that once I feel like it. If anybody feels inclined to do so, then patches are welcome.

Dependencies

apt-get install python-gobject python-yaml python-lxml python-feedparser gir1.2-webkit-3.0

As of February 2012, the dependency size of the following feed readers in a fresh Debian Sid minimal chroot:

pyferea: 172MB
liferea: 225MB
gpodder: 226MB
blam: 408MB
akregator: 758MB

Keyboard shortcuts

To make it faster to switch between the three panes and scroll in them, use the keys 1, 2 and 3 to select the first, second or third pane respectively.

feeds.yaml

It is a yaml dictionary with rss/atom feeds as keys and subdictionaries as values. For each entry they store the category a feed is in and if the link given in a feed entry should be loaded instead of the feed text.

Example:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml:
  category: "IT news"
  loadlink: False
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss:
  category: "IT news"
  loadlink: True

Cookies

Cookies are kept in cookies.txt and are automatically accepted

ythtml5.js

A javascript that I load upon each pageload to convert youtube videos into their html5 versions so that the webkit plugin can render them even withoutme having flash.

Files

pyferea.db

• database of retrieved feeds
• resides in local directory or in $XDG_DATA_HOME/pyferea/

feeds.yaml

• list of feeds urls to retrieve
• resides in local directory, in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pyferea/ or as an example file as /usr/share/pyferea/feeds.yaml.example

javascript

• all javascript files that are to be executed after page load reside in $XDG_DATA_HOME/pyferea/ or in /usr/share/pyferea/ and identify themselves by having the ".js" extension

Possible future work

(patches welcome)

• build debian package
• load javascript selectively and not for every page
• i18n
• downloading (only gui code missing)
• list of unread items
• make re-sorting fast