akregator blog

As the KDE 3.4 branch is created and we can’t do much about it anymore except fixing show stoppers, it’s time to think about the next steps. I created a wiki page where I listed what to do next. Feel free to modify and comment.

The archive redesign is one thing, another important task is writing a Akregator handbook. As we mention the handbook in our about page, it’s embarrassing not to have one.
I brainstormed and created a first draft (only structure, no content yet) in the wiki. If we want it included in 3.4.1, we should hurry. Choose a chapter and start to write

As I looked through the code, I decided not to touch anything but article archive for now. There’s a lot of interdependancies there, and actually neither feeds.opml nor sites.xml are a bottleneck, it’s the archive that is. I’m porting article archive to use Akregator::Backend::Storage now, then for KDE 4 we will slowly port feeds and intervalmanager to work through Storage too, so the main library will be storage-agnostic and well suited for general libakregator, that will be then fancier to use in other apps like knewsticker.
So far the storage api is as simple as open/get article archive/update article(s)/commit/close.

One another nasty thing that gets me is slow article list building for feed groups - click All Feeds and wait two minutes while Akr crawls through all archives building full list, there should be some limit on how many articles from each subfeed to use.

Berkus just commited the first files into the make_it_fly branch of akregator.

CVS commit by karchebny:

* Added our private copy of MetaKit (nice to meet you Sqlite guys!)
* Added startup measuring to feedlist.cpp (now on my feedlist akregator
takes as much as 28.673s to start up, half a minute that is; i want this number
down to not over 1.5s, thank you)

I must say, this is a worthy goal, and has been bugging me for a while as well.

So we finally got a blog. As development is discussed mostly on IRC instead on the mailing lists, there was really a need for a way to inform interested users (devels as well what’s going on. And you can read it conveniently in Akregator, you don’t even have to get off your ass. Isn’t that great?

As you may know, beta9 is out - unfortunately only as part of KDE(-PIM) 3.4 Beta2. To please (and get feedback from) users who are not willing to install KDE beta releases, we should provide a standalone tarball for KDE 3.3 soon.
Since the code is now spread over different directories and even modules, it’s more work now to release a standalone tarball (ripping libkdepim, adjusting Makefile.am’s, including translations etc.). If nobody else volunteers, I will do that on wednesday and we hopefully get the baby released until the weekend.

Btw, the title is not a typo. I suggest we call the baby 1.0 Beta10, as some bugs were fixed since “Keinstein” was tagged.

Okay, after enough fiddling we decided to keep as much as possible info in feeds.opml for interchangeability between user’s KDE installations (just copy feeds.opml over to new machine and have all your feeds set up) and to store archive data in a MetaKit binary storage. With MetaKit’s lazy loading and flexible data structure it should be a breeze. Now I’m wrapping rather “funnily” written library into libkmetakit, and probably we’ll push it hard enough to reach kdelibs/kdesupport at some point (so that other KDE apps can use it freely).
I dream of pushing sqlite to the single place in kdesupport too, but *sigh* it requires lots of interaction between developers…

Markdown format for writing posts described [here](http://puku.conted.ox.ac.uk/help.php?file=markdown.html)

We had a nice chat on redesigning the article archive system of akregator as it is currently slow for things such as startup.

Result of the Chat: We’re going to change from a XML-based system (we basically currently store the article archive as RSS feeds) to a binary format. If that still isn’t performance effective, we’re going to use an embeddable database such as MetaKit or SQLite.

We put some more thoughts up on the wiki: here

Okay, so I whined to Frank today that my startup time is killingly slow. The net effect of this was:
* we got skype chat with all devels
* installed wiki on site
* installed this blog on site
* got first draft for improving archive storage backend (you may find it in wiki, its linked from the HomePage)

Pretty neat for a little whine…