akregator blog

amaroK got podcast support! I am still trying to build it from SVN, but it seems I am coming near.

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

The Catalyst Design Group has published an interesting usability study on blogs and RSS. Not surprisingly, most people are not aware of RSS and its benefits and are confused by things like XML icons and the whole blog newspeak. The purpose of RSS is badly explained to “normal” users.

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.

If you are a beagle user, you might find this interesting: Debajyoti Bera is working on an Akregator backend for beagle, so you can search your feeds like any other data source. It works together with all released Akregator versions, but can’t be used with SVN trunk right now, as we changed the backend to metakit. Hopefully there is a way to use metakit from C#…

Atom 1.0 is near. I haven’t looked at it yet, so I don’t know the changes compared to Atom 0.3 and how much work it will be to support it. I myself won’t have the time to implement it for 3.5. So I guess it has to wait until 3.5.x if noone else volunteers. And yeah, our parser in general and the Atom part of it in particular needs lots of love and major refactoring…