Pimp' your RSS

Posted on March 20, 2007

Thanks to Peter Cooper, trawlr has been featured on Ruby Inside along with an interview with myself about the application’s development.

Trawlr: An amazingly simple Rails-powered feed reader

Welcome to all the new users… I hope you find the site useful and stick around to help make it even better.

(You might experience some slight delay with OPML file import and subscribing to new feeds for a brief period).

Comments
  1. zerohalo – March 21, 2007 @ 07:31 PM

    Cool app – trying it out now. Since I don’t see any place for feedback, I’ll post this here:

    - Any way to add tags to a feed after it’s already been added? I couldn’t find a way to “edit” a feed. - Also, next to each my feeds (the feeds themselves, not the items from the feeds), I get the “favorite items” icon instead of the “favorite feeds” icon (as it should be according to the screencast). - Feature request: A way to delete feeds items, or mark as already read? Maybe you haven’t read them but you don’t want to read them and you don’t want them showing up in your list anymore.

  2. Ben – March 21, 2007 @ 09:24 PM

    @zerohalo

    Cheers for the feedback, hopefully the following will answer your questions.

    • To tag a feed you need to view it (click on the feed icon in your subscription list on the right-hand side). That’ll show the feed with a “My Tags” header near the top which can be edited. You can also rename or delete tags via the “manage” link at the top of the Tags box within the reader view (http:/www.trawlr.com/tags).
    • The favourites icon is the star for both (although it’s shown as a shield in the top right links, rather confusingly).
    • Delete / hide viewed items is very near the top of my TODO list so keep your finger’s crossed (and check this blog for new feature releases)!
  3. Adam – March 21, 2007 @ 11:32 PM

    Looks great, good work.

    I did have trouble importing from and Google Reader export. The page never progresses from the importing page. A progress bar might be nice.

    I had a go at adding Trawlr as a Firefox feed reader using theses instructions http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Adding_feed_readers_to_Firefox Didnt work though dont know why. It locked out all pages from loading on my first attempt.

    The instructions also demonstrate how to create a link on the site to add it as a feed reader automatically. It would be really nice feature and help to ‘trawl’ for more users.

    Good luck with it.

  4. El – March 22, 2007 @ 01:13 AM

    Ben, It would be really useful to have a feedback mechanism rather than comments on blog. 1. how do you bring in shared rss feeds from home page of trawlr (i.e. others’ rss) 2. If I import a huge ompl file…how can I delete what I imported completely rather than go one feed at a time.

  5. zerohalo – March 22, 2007 @ 06:19 AM

    Thanks, Ben, for the quick replies.

    I second El’s suggestion for a feedback mechanism. Might I suggest Retrospectiva or Collaboa.

  6. Ben – March 22, 2007 @ 10:09 AM

    @Adam – Imports can take a while to process (they’re done in the background, not while you wait). You can happily start an import and then continue using the site (or come back later) and your import should be finished when you return. I’ll take a look at the Firefox integration. I currently use a subscribe bookmarklet on my Firefox toolbar to subscribe to feeds (see http://www.trawlr.com/feeds/new for details). That seems to work very nicely.

    @El – Agreed on the feedback front, apart from comments on this blog you can always contact me directly (ben@trawlr.com). Currently you can only unsubscribe from feeds one at a time, it’s on my TODO list to create a separate subscriptions page to address this.

    Thanks for all the feedback :-)