The Ramblings of Octavo

Yes indeed, I built a very early version of DargoReader tonight. At the moment it’s pretty much what you’d expect from only 2.5 hours worth of coding A pretty fragile, rather ugly looking application that grabs a feed, dumps the headlines into a listview and then displays the content when you double click on a headline. Not particularly spectacular, but if you really think about it, all the essential functionality is done now The rest is just parsing feeds being clever with the interface, no?

Ok, so maybe I’m being a tad optimistic, but it’s there and it’s functional. I downloaded FeedReader today to play with it and check out the competition. Man, I must say, in some respects it kick’s Sharpreaders ass, but in a lot of ways it falls short too. It definitely looks nicer though.

Anyway I’m sure most of you are still wondering why the hell I’m bothering to write a feed reader, when there are already so many of them out there (many of them open-source too). Perhaps my slightly offbeat sense of humour doesn’t carry well over the blog, but my intention with this project has never been monetary gain or even a desire to be part of the open-source scene. I’m doing it simply because I think feeds are a really hot technology that’s about to boom and I really see this as a great learning experience for myself. A chance to really grapple with xml in a fun environment without any pressure. And if the project does work out well and I end up happy with it, I will probably release it for download here on Dargo - not that I expect people to actually download it… well ok, I expect at least a few of you to download it…. out of pity maybe

My current job is certainly going to require a lot of xml experience in the near future, so I guess I’ll take any help I can get and when have you ever learned more about a technology then when you were actually coding your own little project around it?

Last note: I seriously need more moods for this damn blog. I’m getting sick of the current crop

I’ve been using Sharpreader for all my feeds since I first discovered RSS, but I keep losing it and all my feeds when I change PC’s and so on. This is a real loss, because then all my comics and favourite blogs don’t get read and I feel like I’m behind on all the news. In order to stop this from happening any more and at the same time fix what I perceive to be broken about Sharpreader (and give me something constructive to do), I intend writing my own feed aggregator.

DargoReader will be available on shelves nationwide soon! I’ll keep you up to date on it’s progress, but for now it’s just an idea. I fully realise that there may be a whole lot more to a feed reader than I currently realise, but that’s the joy of a project like this - you get to play with a cool technology and learn while you’re doing something fun.