Improvement - Rss Feed storage in bookmarks

[CmdrTrix]

I use a few computers (home, work, laptop, etc) and use Foxmarks to synchronise my bookmarks.  The problem is that my rss feeds get stored on a single machine.

I would want the rss feed and its state to be stored in a bookmark folder which is then distributed by Foxmarks.  The basic state (check frequency, etc) could be stored in the description field.  The actual messages I would not need to keep because I would bookmark them if they are interesting.

-Tim

[R Pruitt]

CmdrTrix wrote:

I use a few computers (home, work, laptop, etc) and use Foxmarks to synchronise my bookmarks.  The problem is that my rss feeds get stored on a single machine.

I would want the rss feed and its state to be stored in a bookmark folder which is then distributed by Foxmarks.  The basic state (check frequency, etc) could be stored in the description field.  The actual messages I would not need to keep because I would bookmark them if they are interesting.

I did respond to your review at AMO, but developer responses have to be modded so who knows if and when it will show up.  This watered down version of your recommendation#4 over there might be possible.  I am thinking how it might be done.  It won't be the whole file structure(which is what I assumed you meant at AMO) since even my newsfox folder is 15Mb, and I know much larger ones out there.  

There are other syncing products that do more than bookmarks and mountable remote filesystems(?), but I've never tried any of them.  You can also put your newsfox folder on a flash drive.

I do realize syncing is a necessary feature for a lot of people - it's just harder for us than for the online readers(they have no problem) and the readers that don't store articles.

[R Pruitt]

I talked with the FoxMarks folks and they are not sure what info will be synced in FF3, for example annotations (which would be the natural spot to store stuff) may not be.

But I have been working on this for FF2.  What I have is the following:

Proposal: When a feed is updated, the feed URL and update time are added to the description of a special NewsFox bookmark.  There will be an option to get update times off the bookmark rather than the local one.  If using the bookmark option, all articles will be downloaded, but only the ones timestamped after the bookmarked update time will be marked as unread.

Discussion: This does nothing to sync feeds, but you may have different feeds you look at on different machines and not want feeds to be synced.  If you do want to sync feeds, export an OPML and then add to existing feeds on the other machine.  This won't help with pruning, but you can add feeds from scratch for that.  Example: when traveling I check a smaller subset of feeds, don't want the feeds synced, just the update times.

You may miss articles being marked as unread, because feed authors don't really treat timestamping as meaning the current time.  Many feeds put out articles dated well ahead or behind when they are posted.

Ideas? Comments? Would this give you what you want(are willing to accept :))?

This is not really a feature I will use, but if there are ideas that can be implemented relatively easily (as proposal above), I am willing to put them in.

[CmdrTrix]

R Pruitt wrote:

I talked with the FoxMarks folks and they are not sure what info will be synced in FF3, for example annotations (which would be the natural spot to store stuff) may not be.

It is completely understandable that there may be limitations and I would say that the only requirement would be for a feed to be stored as bookmark in a particular folder and that all new bookmarks sync'd by foxmarks into that folder would then be fetched by NewsFox.  I really just want a list of RSS feeds to be mobile between home, work, my laptop and when i accidentally wipe my firefox bookmarks without backing up.

Accuracy of what has been purged, read, not read, etc is not necessarily that important.  A nice to have would be the storage of the last time i fetched feeds in the bookmark's details however when I think about it and how I use newsfox I don't really think that it is really that necessary.

R Pruitt wrote:

  There will be an option to get update times off the bookmark rather than the local one.  If using the bookmark option, all articles will be downloaded, but only the ones timestamped after the bookmarked update time will be marked as unread.

This would be great.  Having the storage of update times on the bookmark should be optional now that i think about it in more detail however if there are more recent times in your local datastore then use that one.  The limitations around those marked as read/unread/purged is perfectly acceptable.

In actual fact, if there were particular feeds that I felt are very important and I wanted to keep them, I would want to store them as bookmarks.  (New feature: From the list of articles, if I could  rightclick->"Bookmark Selected" instead of having to rightclick the URL below it would be great)

I'm not sure what you mean by the following but I would not want to keep track of individual important items within the feed (e.g. pruning & read) as that is potentially hectic.  Maybe just store configuration details of the feeds such as the frequency it should check the feed (e.g. every hour v.s. every 8 hours).

I might even consider the datestamp stored in the description unnecessary... so rather dont store that as it might cause unnecessary foxmark synchronisations.  Always use information that you keep in your local datastore.

R Pruitt wrote:

Discussion: This does nothing to sync feeds, but you may have different feeds you look at on different machines and not want feeds to be synced.  If you do want to sync feeds, export an OPML and then add to existing feeds on the other machine.

The limitations around those marked as read/unread/purged is perfectly acceptable.  I dont expect the state to be synchronised across machines.

You could probably create three options within configuration.
1. Create feeds as bookmarks [yes/no]
2. Bookmark folder to store feeds [RSS Feeds]
3. Store timestamp details in bookmark description [yes/no]  (maybe just leave this out)

Potentially, within the Options dialog for each feed store an option:
1. Store this feed's configuration in bookmarks [yes/no]  (Checking this will take an existing feed and create a bookmark for it within the folder specified in #2 above.  That way you can have specific feeds that you check on your machine at work.)


Also, this would be nice, just before Tag Selected, Open Selected and Delete Selected:

(New feature: From the list of articles, if I could  rightclick->"Bookmark Selected" instead of having to rightclick the URL below it would be great)


Thank you,

-Timothy

[R Pruitt]

Synchronization discussion continued at https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=14980#c6, merging discussions there.

CmdrTrix wrote:

Also, this would be nice, just before Tag Selected, Open Selected and Delete Selected:

(New feature: From the list of articles, if I could  rightclick->"Bookmark Selected" instead of having to rightclick the URL below it would be great)

This might be possible.  Personally, I'd just flag it, tag it, or put it in a storage feed.