SpoonFeed
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Months ago, after discovering that FeedLounge was a subscription based service, I decided to spend my semester holidays cloning one. Hence, SpoonFeed was conceived. It even has the tagline: “Spoon-feeding you with newsfeeds”. I had great plans for it, since I found FeedLounge still have room for improvements. What’s more, I personally find that FeedLounge is the only worthy web-based feed reader and hence, the only one that’s subscription based.
Unfortunately, the semester holidays flew by and I hardly finished much of SpoonFeed. My new semester’s already started and I wonder how much time do I have to work on SpoonFeed. Sigh.. Nevertheless, I still plan to tackle tiny parts of it on a weekly basis, probably tapering off in 2 months time where assignments for most modules are due. I’ll be posting updates about it weekly, and schedule milestones every Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you: SpoonFeed milestone 3.
A sketch of the future SpoonFeed homepage cum login screen.
Simply put, SpoonFeed is a web-based, RSS newsfeed reader. It uses a PHP5/MySQL backend (though I wonder how much of PHP5’s true potential am I leveraging on), supports ATOM, RDF, RSS and RSS2 formats (details on that later) and sports 5 different layouts. I’m working on the “Add a New Feed” part now, hopefully I can get it completed by the next milestone.
When user want to add a new feed, a dialog prompts them for a URL. Simlpe enough? SpoonFeed will try to fetch that URL, and see if it’s XML, and try to parse it. (Note to self: what if it’s an invalid format?) If it’s a feed, confirm with the user. If it’s a HTML page, try getting the feeds from the link tags. I think it’s a very simple, subtle way of implementing a feed auto-detect function.
After that, I’d be working on feed read/unread functions, and more importantly, polling the server for fresh feeds. That would make it like milestone 5, which I plan to upload to a online server for beta testing. Until then, go here for all SpoonFeed related screenshots. As usual, any feedback arre much appreciated.
Tags: my_web_projects
