[Ext] Brief 1.1 - feed reading extension

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schimi
Posts: 2
Joined: March 8th, 2007, 1:18 am

Cannot view feeds

Post by schimi »

I see the right feeds inside the sidebar but cannot view feeds.

Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.2, czech, Windows XP SP2. With my FF profile with lots of plugins and with other new empty profile. Same failure... :(

Updating of feeds is ok, in console no errors... please help me :)
schimi
Posts: 2
Joined: March 8th, 2007, 1:18 am

Re: Cannot view feeds

Post by schimi »

schimi wrote:I see the right feeds inside the sidebar but cannot view feeds.

Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.2, czech, Windows XP SP2. With my FF profile with lots of plugins and with other new empty profile. Same failure... :(

Updating of feeds is ok, in console no errors... please help me :)


It was problem with my non-ansi user name in xp (c:/Documents And Settings/<non_ansi_name_diacriticsmarks_spaces>/). When I have moved my account to smart username without spaces and diacritics marks, FF Brief was ok....
John Liebson
Posts: 6920
Joined: July 29th, 2003, 1:09 pm

Post by John Liebson »

Ancestor wrote:
John Liebson wrote:More information about the updating process:

1. I opened Brief this morning, at least twelve hours after I last used it. Brief refused to update feeds either by itself or through the use of the "Check all feeds for updates" icon. It was not until I had restarted Firefox that Brief was willing to update my feeds.

Was does "not willing" mean? Did it run through the feeds and found no updates or didn't the progress bar show up at all? In such cases you should always take a look if there are any related errors in the Error Console, otherwise I don't have enough data to diagnose the cause of the problem.

It seems quite unlikely to me that it's Brief's fault and I am inclined to say that it must indeed be a coincidence.

I am somewhat certain that a few days ago, having closed Brief for several hours, that as soon as I opened it, I was shown updated feeds without my having tried the manual update or having restarted Firefox. However, I cannot be absolutely sure that that happened, as I made no particular note about this having occurred, it not seeming to be of much interest at the time.

Well, by default Brief periodically checks for updates in the background. Are you sure you have this turned off?


Briefly [pun most assuredly intended...]:

1. Brief would not update under any conditions except by my restarting Firefox; it would then update once, and only once.
2. Background updates were turned on, not off.
3. A short while ago, I created a new Firefox profile, created a bookmark folder for rss feeds, inserted two feeds, then installed Brief.
3a. Brief now updated each time I tried it, without having to restart Firefox.
4. I then created a subfolder in the bookmark rss folder, inserted one feed, Brief stopped working.
5. So, back to my regular Firefox profile, created new folder, started process all over again.
6. I now cannot tell anyone what fixed the problems, for I have not the slightest idea. All I know is that I moved some rss feeds from one folder to another, created a new subfolder, could not duplicate the problem.
7. Moved everything back to original rss folder/subfolders, updated Brief, read/marked as read, reupdated, etc.

Conclusion: At least as of perhaps thirty minutes ago, Brief was working properly. Why? As written above, I don't know. I would prefer knowing, so that I could inform others and you could add the problem to the "watch out for these" list, but I have not the slightest idea.
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Aus
Posts: 183
Joined: September 6th, 2004, 1:59 pm

Post by Aus »

Ancestor wrote:
Okay, here's what Ancestor and I have found:

1. I submitted the requested edited bookmarks.html file to him. For reasons unknown (and likely unknowable), all the entries in that file worked for Ancestor, but not for me.

2. I then did some experimenting and discovered that, were I to remove and replace the bookmarks.html file entries that would not show in Brief for me, these feeds then worked correctly.

(Now to figure out how to make the newly-entered feeds appear in alphabetic order in Brief; they are correct in the .html file, but in Brief they appear in the order in which I entered them, below the previously-working/not-removed entries.)

Thanks to John's help I finally managed to figure it out. It turns out that Brief wasn't showing some of the bookmarked feeds because they waren't Live Bookmarks. Instead, these were just feeds' addresses saved as ordinary bookmarks. They may be easy to confuse, so anyone is experiencing this, please make sure that your feeds are bookmarked as Live Bookmarks.


I'm glad to see you have identified the problem, the question is, what to do with the 150 or so feeds I have collected using Sage.

From your comments, I take it that 'Live Bookmarks' are different, perhaps non-standard in some way, and as Brief currently does not support OPML import/export, the only way one could switch to Brief, would be by re-subscribing to any feeds collected via some other reader?
Ancestor
Posts: 252
Joined: May 7th, 2005, 12:51 pm

Post by Ancestor »

javiervb wrote:In fact, the problem is more important, because they are not really different feeds, but feeds provided by another person in my company that uses Google Reader. This person reads more than 300 feeds and have created different Google Reader feeds using "tags" (one for marketing, one for finance, one for human resources, and so on). But one post can receive multiple tags and, therefore, forms part of different derivative Google Reader XML feeds.

I'll consider changing this behavior, then.

javiervb wrote:It seems a very complex problem. Again in my case, I cannot guess a reason Google Reader may change the date/time of the post selected previously. At first, the only time that should appear should be the original one of the original post (it seems this is the date/time used) or the moment the post is selected and "labeled". Sadly, I cannot be of help here, because, as you said in your reply, it is a really complex decision to be taken. Anyway, Sage, NewsFox and WizzRSS seems to be able to handle this problem.

No, they aren't. As far as I know, they don't store entries permanently, so this issue doesn't affect them. They just show the feed content as it is at the moment.
And, now, another question: How am I able to print a list of items (when I try to print or print preview the list of items I get an error message).

I don't think I'll be providing support for printing.

schimi wrote:
schimi wrote:I see the right feeds inside the sidebar but cannot view feeds.

Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.2, czech, Windows XP SP2. With my FF profile with lots of plugins and with other new empty profile. Same failure... :(

Updating of feeds is ok, in console no errors... please help me :)


It was problem with my non-ansi user name in xp (c:/Documents And Settings/<non_ansi_name_diacriticsmarks_spaces>/). When I have moved my account to smart username without spaces and diacritics marks, FF Brief was ok....

Thank you so much! A couple of users have been reporting this problem and I haven't been able to identify the reason. It's definitely something that should be fixed.

John Liebson - thanks for the research. Let me know if you come across any solid pattern.

Aus wrote:I'm glad to see you have identified the problem, the question is, what to do with the 150 or so feeds I have collected using Sage.

From your comments, I take it that 'Live Bookmarks' are different, perhaps non-standard in some way, and as Brief currently does not support OPML import/export, the only way one could switch to Brief, would be by re-subscribing to any feeds collected via some other reader?

Yes, unfortunately.
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andyed
Posts: 78
Joined: November 5th, 2002, 6:31 am
Location: Clemson, SC
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Re: Issues on OSX?

Post by andyed »

Ancestor wrote:Thanks, that's very helpful. What OS are you running?

It doesn't look like it's got anything to do with Google Synch, by the way.


I'm running OSX... sorry, should have mentioned it.

Any reason you're not using the bugzilla for Brief at mozdev?

I don't see a need to do it. It may become useful when (if) Brief really takes off but right now I think this thread does the job.[/quote]

Ok, bugzilla makes things much more trackable -- and would have prompted me to specify OS :)

Any ideas on a fix?
Ancestor
Posts: 252
Joined: May 7th, 2005, 12:51 pm

Re: Issues on OSX?

Post by Ancestor »

andyed - I think I fixed it but I can't test it. It'd be great if you could verify the fix when the next version comes out.
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pirlouy
Posts: 232
Joined: February 11th, 2005, 6:29 am
Location: France

Post by pirlouy »

Is this normal that firefox live bookmarks show me some news, whereas Brief doesn't show nothing.
For example, AMO firefox New extensions RSS : recent extensions are present in bookmarks, but the last one in Brief is friday 02 March.
Ancestor
Posts: 252
Joined: May 7th, 2005, 12:51 pm

Post by Ancestor »

pirlouy wrote:Is this normal that firefox live bookmarks show me some news, whereas Brief doesn't show nothing.
For example, AMO firefox New extensions RSS : recent extensions are present in bookmarks, but the last one in Brief is friday 02 March.

As far as I can see, Brief shows the same extensions as the Live Bookmark, just in a different order. The feed is out of date compared to what's on the website, by the way.
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pirlouy
Posts: 232
Joined: February 11th, 2005, 6:29 am
Location: France

Post by pirlouy »

Ahh... I hadn't seen this feed was corrupted... Sorry
burntvermin
Posts: 3
Joined: March 13th, 2007, 10:10 pm

Post by burntvermin »

Aus wrote:I'm glad to see you have identified the problem, the question is, what to do with the 150 or so feeds I have collected using Sage.

From your comments, I take it that 'Live Bookmarks' are different, perhaps non-standard in some way, and as Brief currently does not support OPML import/export, the only way one could switch to Brief, would be by re-subscribing to any feeds collected via some other reader?


This singed rat had a problem with that too, and came up with a bit of a kludge to make the feeds show up.

  • Find your bookmarks.html file.
  • Open it with your favourite text editor.
  • For each potential feed bookmark, change the HREF="..." to FEEDURL="..."
  • Save it and restart the browser


It's a pain but not as much of a pain as re-creating the bookmarks through the gui. Make sure you make a backup of your bookmarks.html file first though, just in case you mistype something (it happens!).

However: the feeds on this end now suffer from the failure to update problem. They update once and only once, when Brief initially loads. Looking at the bookmarks.html shows live bookmarks have a few less attributes than plain-old bookmarks, so experiments will continue...
burntvermin
Posts: 3
Joined: March 13th, 2007, 10:10 pm

Post by burntvermin »

As an addendum, there is a way to import OPML files as live bookmarks, using the addon at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2625/. Be aware that preliminary testing shows the add on will import the feeds into your bookmarks' top level directory, and you'll have to drag them around by hand, but it's still way simpler than the previous kludge this smouldering ferret posted.
xanathon
Posts: 1
Joined: March 14th, 2007, 8:43 am

Post by xanathon »

Thanks for this very useful extension!

Some reports and suggestions:

If I add Brief to my startpages that are opened in tabs on Firefox-startup in the preferences (via the link chrome://brief/content/brief.xul) then no feeds are displayed in Brief when Firefox is opened. I have to close the tab and open Brief manually via it's icon. What is to do? Do I have to change the link?

It is not very comfortable to delete multiple entries. It would be great if there were a checkbox beside every newsentry that I could check and then delete them all for every feed page. Maybe via a link on the top "delete all marked" or the like. At the moment you have to dropdown every entry to delete it which is time-consuming and inconvenient.

Quite often news that I already read and deleted reappear. I can only guess that this is because the news were updated on the newspage. When I check them however, nothing has changed at all. Is it possible to invent some kind of short-time caching mechanism that checks if an entry is really a new one? (and is not fetched if the entry was already read and/or deleted)

Thanks for your efforts!

Xanathon
Ancestor
Posts: 252
Joined: May 7th, 2005, 12:51 pm

Post by Ancestor »

xanathon wrote:If I add Brief to my startpages that are opened in tabs on Firefox-startup in the preferences (via the link chrome://brief/content/brief.xul) then no feeds are displayed in Brief when Firefox is opened. I have to close the tab and open Brief manually via it's icon. What is to do? Do I have to change the link?

The address is fine, it's a bug. Thanks for the heads-up!
It is not very comfortable to delete multiple entries. It would be great if there were a checkbox beside every newsentry that I could check and then delete them all for every feed page. Maybe via a link on the top "delete all marked" or the like. At the moment you have to dropdown every entry to delete it which is time-consuming and inconvenient.

In the next version it will a standalone button, just like "Mark as Read".
Quite often news that I already read and deleted reappear. I can only guess that this is because the news were updated on the newspage. When I check them however, nothing has changed at all. Is it possible to invent some kind of short-time caching mechanism that checks if an entry is really a new one? (and is not fetched if the entry was already read and/or deleted)

See this post for a detailed explanation. I'm still tweaking it, so hopefully I will be able to improve it.
Thanks for your efforts!

Thank you, I'm doing my best.
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Mr. Mojo
Posts: 6
Joined: August 10th, 2005, 9:41 pm

Post by Mr. Mojo »

Hey,

First of all : thanks for this great extension !

But, as you've guessed, I've got a problem. I synchronize my rss feeds between home and office by using Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. The problem is when I've marked as read my feeds on my office computer, and that I import them on my home computer and update them, feeds are considered by Brief as unread. I'm then obliged to check them all again (around 70 feeds). I haven't got that problem with Sage, feeds marked as read on a computer were still read on the other.

I hope I'm clear enough with the explanation.
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