However, to make the parser even better, more real-world test feeds are needed, feeds that I would never think of, feeds that use exotic encodings, (mis-)use the standards in creative ways, or contain additional information that is not covered by Akregator yet: your feeds.

If you have any feed in your feed list that isn’t rendered correctly, or that has some feature supported in other feed readers but not in Akregator, add it here. Exceptions are the well-known missing features, like categories, enclosures and advanced support for author information - these are already supported by libsyndication.

Some good criteria for a feed that would be useful for us:

• the feed has problems with character encoding (special characters or your non-latin script are not displayed correctly), linebreaks and whitespace.
• the feed isn’t rendered correctly in Akregator but Feed Validator doesn’t report errors.
• the feed isn’t rendered correctly in Akregator, Feed Validator reports errors, but the problem exists for a lot of feeds (e.g. because some widely used generator messes it up).
• The feed uses some RSS or Atom extension that you find important enough to be supported in coming Akregator versions.

You can add your test feeds to the Wiki page (preferred), add it here as comment, or send it by mail to the mailing list (no subscription needed).

kdebase is optional, you can just skip it (as it doesn’t always build) and go for kdepim directly. See previous blog entry how to build and install akregator.
You might also read README.qt-copy in qt-copy/ to learn how to speed up Qt4 compilation (i.e., don’t build examples and such).

To compile Akregator, you need to compile and install the directories bottom-up: do unsermake in libkmime, ktnef, libemailfunctions, libkcal, libkdepim, akregator, and then unsermake install in the same order. More information on how to install kdelibs+kdepim from trunk/ to follow…


[Advanced]
Show Tagging GUI=true


When you start Akregator for the next time, “My Tags” tab and the tagging menu should reappear.

So what can you expect for Akregator in 3.5? Vastly improved startup times when you have many feeds, and better performance in general (e.g. selecting “All Feeds” is safe now) . There is an optional text-to-speech toolbar you can use to let the computer speak selected articles. Apart from that, there are several little features and improvements I won’t list in detail now (gotta update the changelog though).

From october on I will have more time for KDE and Akregator again, so stay tuned

Update: I managed to install it. Now I have a hard time to get the engines running without crashes.
Update 2:It works!

What we should ask us for Akregator: Do people grok what Akregator is good for and use it? Do they know how to add feeds conveniently and use the konq feed icon? Probably it’s far too small, unexplained and cryptic and 95% of users just ignore it.

I hope replacing the “RSS” in the konq icon and using a more verbose tooltip than “add feed to akregator” improves it at least a bit. That’s how it looks like in SVN:

Maybe we should use something even more simple like “Inform me on site updates”, whatever.

In the last weeks, several new contributors joined us. Eike Hein implemented the delayed mark as read feature, Heinrich Wendel fixed a lot tons of bugs, and our bug tracker manager Eckhart Wörner submitted his first patch (and probably more to come). This is great, as it gives new momentum to Akregator development, after it was slowed down a bit due to lack of developers and their spare time.

A major feature for Akregator 1.5 (released as part of KDE-PIM 3.5) I implemented is “tag folders”, which means you can create tags like “Interesting”, “Funny”, “Programming”, “Basketball”, whatever, and assign them to articles (very similar to tags in Digikam). At the moment, tagging can be done only manually, but automatic tagging by KMail-like filters is planned (Like “if article contains ‘KDE’, assign ‘KDE’ tag”). Here you can see how it looks right now (click the image for the full screenshot):

Related to tagging, Dennis Nienhüser is experimenting with text classification tools like bayes filters and the like, to filter articles for the stuff the user finds interesting. Another use for classification would be to suggest tags for articles based on similarity to the already tagged articles. We plan to plug in several classification libs via DCOP and look how they work for our purposes. Who knows, maybe we even get something working for KDE-PIM 3.5.

Last but not least, RSS 2.0 enclosures are now supported by the backend, so you can expect at least very basic support for podcasts soon. Showing them attachment-like will be easy, but I am not sure if we get more sophisticated support implemented until feature freeze (August, 1st). If you want to help here, dear reader, you are of course invited to join us