I didn't know until today, but my RSS feed has been broken for a few days. Changes here at Freeshell removed some of the dependencies my script needed to create the feed. Apologies to anyone who uses this feed.
If you've been keeping up with Blogzilla, you might know that Newsmonster 1.2.2 Pro was recently released for free. It is a "news aggregator" in the form of extensions to your web browser. It pulls RSS feeds from the sites you are interested and collects them all together for your perusal, making it easier to keep up with content.
For an application that is supposed to make your life easier, it is a pain to get working under Debian Woody 3.0 (stable). However, with a few quick, custom updates, you too can live in Newsmonster nirvana. These instructions assume you are using Mozilla.
I'm not 100% sure if this is required, but it helped get rid of some errors I saw when trying to run under the decrepit version of the First Lizard that comes with Debian Woody. Using 1.0.x just doesn't cut it these days—a quick upgrade to 1.5 solved my initial problems. You can find a deb source at apt-get.org. I used the repository at http://debian.relativ.org/. To do this, add the following line to your apt sources file.
deb http://debian.relativ.org/ .Then, after killing your browser, run an apt-get update
&& apt-get upgrade to bask in the glory of the 1.5 Lizard.
Getting Java 1.4 was the biggest hurdle to getting Newsmonster working in Woody. I had 1.3 installed from some deb source but that doesn't work. Newsmonster requires 1.4 but nobody packages 1.4 for Woody currently. But you can manually install it. Blackdown Java seems to be the best choice.
First, remove any installation of Blackdown java you have on your box, deb or otherwise. Then go to one of the Blackdown mirrors and find the appropriate j2sdk and j2re 1.4.x packages for your system, for me, I found them at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.1/i386/01/. Down load the .bin files for GCC 2.9.5 to somewhere to install, like /usr/local, change the permissions to 700, and run them. Then create a symbolic link from /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1/jre/plugin/i386/mozilla/javaplugin_oji.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/javaplugin_oji.so (assuming you installed in /usr/local).
Read good instructions for getting the java plugin working under your browser if you have trouble.
Then, start up your browser. Check about:plugins to make sure that you have the java plugin installed. Make sure that java, javascript, and software installation are enabled in Mozilla. Then, as root, go and download Newsmonster by just clicking on the button. If software installation is enabled, you should be prompted to install, answer yes. Then kill your browser.
That's it. As your user account, start Mozilla and begin the setup process for Newsmonster. I'm still learning how to use it at this point, as the documentation isn't so great. But all in all, it is a nice bit of work.
One nice feature of Newsmonster is that you can add a feed to your subscription list right from your browser. Right click on the page of a blog you read (like LAB-Y), and select "Add to Newsmonster". Follow the instructions and blam-o, you've got a new subscription. This autodiscovery does work here at LAB-Y.
The only problem I've noticed so far with Newsmonster is that it doesn't work with Prefbar, my favorite Mozilla extension. Anybody have luck getting these two XPI apps working together?
Anyway, happy blogging!
I think when I pinged my blog at blo.gs, I gave myself a very unhelpful name. How does one change this?
Update your rss file, then re-ping yourself with a different name parameter in the URL. Works like a charm. You can find the feed for LAB-Y at blo.gs by searching for "Lab y".
Any press, the news, I don't watch the two
As of today, LAB-Y as an RSS 1.0 news feed and a fabulous new blogroll (see sidebar). I've been meaning to get this working for a while now and it is finally done. You can catch LAB-Y updates at http://blo.gs. w00t!
There haven't been many updates here at LAB-Y for a while. My life has been sucked down the black-hole of panic mode at work. It has gone from bad, all of the way through worse (without a bathroom break), to positively apeshit in just a month or two.
I had been working on getting RSS integrated into LAB-Y code but thanks to my job, it has slowed down quite a bit. I'm going for the path of least resistance and work, rather than trying to choose the best version for me based upon any set of features. This is yielding a solution that is shaping up to use Perl and XML::RSS to generate my feed, a crontab script to get other peoples feeds, and a PHP script with XML_RSS to parse those feeds. My feed is probably going to be RSS 1.0, as that's the best version XML::RSS supports currently.
Fixed a bad link.