newsRiver.root

Background

For important background information see this post on my WordPress weblog.

How to Install

0. Choose Get Latest Code from the Community menu in the OPML Editor to be sure you have the latest updates. Some are necessary to run newsRiver.root.

1. Download newsRiver.root into the Guest Databases/apps/Tools sub-folder of the OPML Editor application folder.

2. You may have to quit and restart the OPML Editor for it to show up in the Tools menu.

3a. If you have an OPML subscriptions file -- choose Import OPML from the NewsRiver sub-menu of the Tools menu. A dialog appears asking you to locate the file. It quickly reads the OPML file, imports your subscriptions and asks if you want to do a scan. If you click on OK, it reads all the feeds. When the scan is a complete (it may take a few minutes) a dialog appears asking if you'd like to view the new stuff. If you click on OK, a browser window opens showing the last 250 items. The first time it reads the feeds you may want to skip viewing, since it finds so much news, it can be fairly overwhelming.

3b. If you don't have an OPML file to import (this is your first use of an aggregator) choose Do Scan Now from the NewsRiver sub-menu of the Tools menu. It reads a default set of popular news feeds (for example, the BBC and New York Times) and weblogs. When the scan is complete, view the new items by choosing View News from the News River sub-menu of the Tools menu.

How to subscribe to a feed

Choose Subscribe from the NewsRiver sub-menu of the Tools menu. Paste the address of the feed in the dialog and click on OK. If it was able to subscribe, a dialog appears saying it was successful. If it couldn't subscribe, an error dialog will appear.

You can see what you're subscribed to by choosing View Subscriptions from the NewsRiver sub-menu of the Tools menu. You can also subscribe to new feeds or unsubscribe to one or more feeds from that page.

Every hour it does a scan

Every hour NewsRiver automatically does a scan of all the feeds you're subscribed to. You don't have to do anything to make this happen. The scan happens at the same minute in the hour every time, this minute is chosen at random the first time NewRiver runs. If you would prefer that it run at a different time, you can set that by choosing the Set Minute to Scan command from the Tools menu.

Quick fixes based on initial feedback

1. Don't open scratchpad.args when posting to weblog. This was some debugging code that got left turned on.

2. Set the "created" attribute on weblog posts so that permalinks work.

3. Update newsRiver.root automatically after every scan.

To get these changes, choose Get Latest Code from the News River sub-menu of the Tools menu.

More docs to come later

In the meantime I hope you have fun with the software. If you have questions post them in a comment here.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 12/29/05; 8:34:48 PM - --