Hi everyone, I now consider VizReader to be stable enough, and feature complete enough (for me) that I will stop working on it.
To those of you who tried it out the first time, feel free to try it out again at http://vizreader.com (all your info has been erased ten times over so you have to register again). Even if you don't have an OPML to import you won't be a sitting duck anymore as you will have the option of subscribing to existing feeds after registration is complete :-) I've written a little bit about the process here: http://www.prodevtips.com/2010/03/20/how-to-write-a-big-app-in-an-obscure-lisp-dialect-you-dont-know/ I might maybe come off a little bit unappreciative in some places in that article, however that is not really the case. Take for instance what I see as the biggest problem with PicoLisp; the lack of existing libraries for doing common suff. I knew before I started hacking away on VizReader that that was the case but I wanted to complete the project anyway and any grief I got from the fact that there are few libraries is therefore self inflicted. In retrospect most of the non-trivial important parts of the application were practically written by Alex, the asynchronous imports for instance, or the remote indexing routines, clever idx stuff and much more. Anyway, I wanted to see for myself is PicoLisp is a valid alternative when it comes to web development in general and the answer is YES. Thanks for the help Alex! /Henrik On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Henrik Sarvell <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, so the picolisp application I've been working on and off > on for the past year has started to come together. It's a feed reader. > > It can be found here: http://vizreader.com > > The reasons for making a feed reader are many, but there are two that stand > out: > 1.) I don't like Google Reader, the GUI for instance is annoying. > 2.) Even if I liked GR it would still be a good idea since I've > realized that almost 100% of the time I spend on the internet - when > I'm not googling or browsing wikipedia - is in the reader. Being able > to control that experience is important, getting Google to implement > feature requests is a long shot... > > The name comes from the fact that there are quite a lot of > visualizations that can be employed to make sense of the information, > but most of all for discovery, especially the link maps. In this > respect the Twitter link map has been really helpful. It wasn't > supposed to be like that from the beginning but I got hooked on > visualizing at some point down the road. The visualizations are > displayed through shockwave files so the flash player is a must if you > want to view them. > > At this point there are no community functions but everything is > primed for this if the reader gets a few regular users. > > Feel free to try it out, some pointers first though: > 1.) Don't test it just because it's a picolisp application, the feed > reader should be a really important application for you, just like it > is for me. At this point I don't want a lot of unused cruft i the DB. > 2.) If you use Twitter then vizreader will be especially useful as the > system doesn't differentiate between microblogging and normal > blogging, only the display of the posts are different, a difference > that I enjoy a lot. > 3.) If you like it please don't tell anyone who don't fit the > description in #1, at this initial stage it is a good thing with only > serious users. > > Some instructions/information: > - Separate tags with commas, yes tags can contain spaces (I hate when > they can't). > - If you update your twitter feed note that the interface you end up > in will refresh the feed every 60 seconds, it will of course go > towards your daily API limit. > - The whole database is updated 6 AM central US time, using the > application for the next 30-60 minutes will be painful as there will > be frequent write blocks in place. I will look into the new pubsubhub > protocol to see if this procedure can be eliminated in the future. > - If a feed is selected for reading and it hasn't been updated in the > last two hours it will be updated, this can take some time, yet again > the subhub thing could solve this problem in the future. > - There are no error messages when external sources time out. > - So far only OPML files exported by GR and a desktop app called > FeedReader has been tested to work. The xml.l library is used to > import them so they have to be perfectly formatted. > - The positive/negative graphs/features should be considered a joke at > the moment since they simply use word lists to determine the amount of > negative or positive words in an article. They only respect first > level negations, "not good" will be interpreted as a negative > statement but "not very good" will slip through and be interpreted as > a positive statement. > > TODO: > - Show error messages when external sources time out. > - When a feed is added the feed list should update right away instead > of having to reload the home page. > - Update the number of unread posts in every feed in a certain > category/tag when the category is "opened" in the list to the left. > - Profile setting that controls behavior when a feed is clicked, > update always, never or after an arbitrary interval, it's speed versus > freshness which is important enough that it should be controlled by > each user. > - Get it to work on the 64bit version, it is currently running on the > 32bit version. > > I hope some of you will test it in a serious fashion and like this > first draft despite the rough edges! > > /Henrik >
