New user / feature requests: column displays, font size, auto-renumbering feeds,

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Edward Morbius

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Jan 6, 2014, 7:41:04 AM1/6/14
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Josh:

I've just discovered Slick RSS in the past two days.  It's, well, pretty slick.  A brief review:  http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1udv6i/further_adventures_in_rss_chrome_reader_extension/

I've read enough of the newsgroup to see that you've got a major rewrite in process, hopefully this is stuff you're tackling in it.

  • For the feed item display, since you're a Chrome plugin and Chrome supports CSS3 columns, ditching the table display and using columns would solve a few issues, including balancing column widths automatically, avoiding gaps between items, and (with @media & width queries), even auto-adapting the presentation to screen widths.  A user switch to disable columns might also be useful.
  • I'd really prefer to have a font-size option, or alternatively, that font size be set as (take your pick) "small" or "medium" (and preferences for the latter).  Your choice of 12px is far too small for my old eyes (and small screen).  I generally set content at 15px, which translates as 20px on my monitor.  Show some mercy.  I typically re-style websites (browser zoom tends to be ugly in other ways) using Stylebot or Stylish, but those don't work for content rendered by extensions :(   Ah ... I've just found the extension directory and stylesheets.  I guess I can fix this one myself (I haven't mucked much with Chrome extensions other than installing them).
  • I've noticed that if I renumber feeds to change placement, I'll end up with a bunch of ties.  It might make sense if, once an order was specified, the feeds were number in the actual order of appearance.  Or you've addressed this by other means.
  • Some means of bulk-managing feeds rather than editing them one-at-a-time would be convenient.  I suppose the easiest way to do this right now would be via the export utility.  Which, now that I look at it, seems doable (I'm more than comfortable in vim and with regular expressions).  Oh, even better:  newsbeuter (more below) can import/export OPML feeds.
For the columns, the following CSS fixes actually accomplish most of that without even rewriting the HTML by redefining the table elements to block elements with appropriate values (I'm still getting breaks within preview blocks which I'd prefer to avoid, but it's much better):

#feedPreview
{
        font-size: 15pt;
        width: 100%;
        display: block;
        -webkit-column-count: 2;
}


#feedPreview td
{
        display: block;
}

#feedPreview > tr > td h2 {
        -webkit-column-break-after: avoid;
}

#feedPreviewContainer {
        -webkit-column-break-inside: avoid;
}



Another reader I've been really impressed with is newsbeuter.  It's a console utility rather than a graphic one, but in particular it has:
  • Tags.  Feeds can have multiple tags associated with them.  I can then view a subset of feeds by tag.
  • Search.  "/expression" searches will show all feed items matching the expression.  Say you're following breaking news on some topic, this will show you everything related to that item.
  • Killfiles.  Expressions which are excluded from feeds can be written.
  • Lots of keyboard nav.  That's an advantage of console-based tools generally.
You might want to steal some ideas from there.

Thanks for a great tool.

Hecktarzuli

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Jan 8, 2014, 10:10:33 PM1/8/14
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Sweet, thanks for the feedback, I see some great features here.


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