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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 (i seldomly use it), the date/time in the entry panel doesnt update correctly over time (i can live with it for now) 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.

Possible future work

(patches welcome)

build debian package
add hooks to load custom javascript/css for feeds
i18n
downloading
list of unread items
make re-sorting fast

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