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news in one page -- but not a webpageAnother "clevercactus tip of the day". :-) The other day, Dave was saying that using the three-pane paradigm to present news in an aggregator was not the way to go. Today, he linked to a piece by Adam Curry in which, among other things, Adam puts forward the same idea. One important difference (aside from the UI) between typical three-pane readers and web-page readers is what Dave refers to as "the queue". Adam mentions that another advantage is that part of the "freshness" of RSS feeds is how you can get a view of a number of different POVs on the same idea. Both of these uses (and more) are not just legitimate, they are also clearly useful in many cases. But sometimes I want to see what just one person has said recently, and for that the three-pane view rules. Additionally, at times an item might contain more than a short description, it might contain the full text of the entry, for which three-pane views rule as well (since the full text could be really long). So, is it possible to have both? Absolutely :) When reading feeds in clevercactus you can get the combined effect of a "one-page" view with the benefits of a three-pane view. As an example, consider the following two screenshots. Number one shows the "aggregated" view, where all the feeds are shown together. Number two shows only the space that is aggregating Scripting News. Just one click takes me from a bird's eye view to a more specific per-blog view. How does this happen? In clevercactus, a space is recursive, that is, it automatically shows not only its contents but the contents of its subspaces (which are also recursive, and so on) with the proper ordering. So this effect happens transparently and automatically. Now this is close, but no dice yet, since (as opposed to the way in which webpage aggregators do it) the news items remain there in the aggregator, which can potentially (and very quickly) create clutter (This is another one of Dave's good points). In an upcoming version of clevercactus, you'll be able to set the "decay rate" of items (automatically set by default to a sensible value). This means that after, say, seven days, feed items will be deleted automatically unless explicitly marked for permanent storage through a one-click procedure on the item itself (An icon saying "Store this") -- And bingo, we've got the functional equivalent of the aggregated webpage view, but in a three-pane UI, with "entry decay" for the first time. Some users will still prefer a webpage view (which you can also get in clevercactus using webaccess, btw!). And that's what it's all about isn't it? Giving the users choice. Update: Ted was commenting on this entry and comparing clevercactus to FeedDemon. He said: it seems to me that Clevercactus looks a lot like FeedDemon, except that FeedDemon can do a newspaper, and Clevercactus can't, and Clevercactus has PIM info, which FeedDemon doesn'tI didn't know about FeedDemon's Newspaper View. Very nice! However, I must say that clevercactus has a lot more than "PIM info"-- some examples are the webaccess feature, weblog posting, email, and Real Soon Now a bunch of other cool things, such as real-time collaboration and synchronization. Reading feeds (Both RSS and Atom) is just one more of the information channels that clevercactus can handle. Update 2: Sam linked to this entry and Dare commented that SharpReader and RSS Bandit support this kind of functionality. Dare was also wondering whether I thought that cc was first on this, and I replied: Clevercactus was first. CC was originally called spaces, and it was released publicly on November 11, 2002 (the name changed in April this year), supporting exactly that functionality (on both feeds and email), which predates most if not all the 3-pane aggregators that I know of, and certainly those that do recursive aggregation (of course, corrections are welcome--you never know :)).As usual, corrections or more comments are welcome. :-) Update 3: In another comment on Sam's blog Dare noted that he implemented "entry decay" in RSS Bandit about a month ago. It's not deployed (then again clevercactus isn't either), but this predates my first public mention of this feature by at least a week (obviously more, since Dare noted the release of the code on that entry, rather than the idea as I did). Cool. PS: Are we all in sync or what? :-))) Categories: clevercactusPosted by diego on August 14 2003 at 12:08 AM Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).
Can you also delete items by hand? One of the things I liked most about Userland's aggregator was that you deleted items you'd read. Very handy. Other than that, it sounds like a very neat system. If I had more time today I'd download it and have a play. Posted by: Andrew Ducker at August 14, 2003 9:33 AMAndrew, yes, you can delete items by hand. In that sense clevercactus works exactly like an email reader. You can delete items, move them around (and so relate them to other data in different spaces), re-post them directly to a weblog (LiveJournal not supported yet though, sorry), email them directly, etc. Posted by: Diego at August 14, 2003 4:39 PMFYI, in the Radio aggregator you can also read all the items in just one feed. Click on the magnifying glass next to the feed name. Posted by: Dave Winer at August 14, 2003 6:27 PMSharpReader also has the cumulative view of articles inside a three pane view; to see it just click on the Subscribed Feeds node at the top of the list of feeds. Pretty trivial. Posted by: BillSaysThis at August 14, 2003 6:31 PMDave, correction noted! I admit I had forgotten about that and I got carried away when I was writing :-)) Bill, I added SharpReader as another reader that supports this in the second update to the entry. Certainly I didn't mean that clevercactus was the only reader that could do this, but it somehow gets read that way--as I pointed out in the comment on Sam's blog and the second update to this entry as well. Posted by: Diego at August 14, 2003 7:28 PMHow am I going to search past entries if you expire them ;-)? Can you do *feed* expiration? The latest FeedDemon beta can do blog posting via w.bloggar. I count e-mail as PIM info these days. FeedDemon's newspaper view is done via XSLT and an embedded IE. My kingdom (and some $$) for the first newspaper view that doesn't use an HTML viewer to present the newspaper. Posted by: Ted Leung at August 14, 2003 8:13 PMTed, when I talk about "entry decay" I am referring to a configurable parameter--of course you'll be able to set it to "no-decay" :) and so keep your data forever. (I'm pretty sure this is what Dare was also talking about, btw). Regarding the idea of "feed" expiration: very interesting. It would be easy to maintain stats and add a function that would suggest which feeds are due for removal based on activity or maybe other parameters. (No automatic suggestions though--it would be like "the return of clipit"). When you say "a Newspaper view that doesn't use an HTML viewer", what do you mean? Could you be more specific? Are you referring to using native widgets for that, or something along those lines? If so, another cool idea :) Posted by: Diego at August 14, 2003 8:35 PMIf you want to read what just one person has said recently, you can also just surf over to their web page. :-)
Flock (flock.sourceforge.net), a Tapestry/servlet based aggregator, does the recursive aggregation. I am using feeds on feeds (http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/) as server side news aggregator on my web server. John, Pierre, both examples are of webpage, server-side aggregators -- not client-side three-pane aggregators, which was the type of UI that was under discussion (since even "webpage aggregators", can be client-side, ie. Radio Userland, have been doing similar things for a while). (John: I didn't know about flock though, looks very nice!). Posted by: Diego at August 16, 2003 11:23 AMNetNewsWire had this feature in July 2002 according to the change notes. And its combined view is an even more innovative and effective way of combining the benefits of both. Posted by: Aaron Swartz at August 19, 2003 5:58 AMArgh, please don't strip HTML without a notice or warning. Here are the links: http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/changenotes/lite10b1to102.php Aaron, you're absolutely right, thanks for the correction! I had not seen the Netnewswire "combined view"--in expanded mode it reminds me a lot of how the Radio aggregator looks/works, in a sense, but with widgets. Very cool. Now, of course :-), I'll note (again) that having a single "all feeds view" (as Netnewswire and others have) is not the same as having a recursive subscription tree. In clevercactus this is more of a side-effect for RSS feeds (since spaces are recursive for all data types) than an actual feature, with the consequence that it's more flexible but maybe (certainly at the beginning) less obvious. Posted by: Diego at August 19, 2003 11:19 AMI'm pretty sure NetNewsWire is what you call recursive. You can click from all feeds to any subset of feeds or an individual feed and the subsets can be nested as deep as you like. Can you explain the difference between that and "recursive"? Posted by: Aaron Swartz at August 19, 2003 3:17 PMAaron, obviously what you describe is recursive. Obviously you know that I have to know that, and that what happened is that I was simply confused about how Netnewswire works exactly, rather than being confused about what "recursive" means. I'm not trying to re-write the dictionary here. I retract my previous statement, which was, quite plainly, *wrong* in implying that Netnewswire was *not* recursive. NNW would then be the first implementation to support this kind of behavior for feeds (again, in cc this is a side-effect since feeds are just another datatype, but that's a different matter). And of course, if someone else has other prior art, I'd be interested to know, but NNW stands for now as the first example of this type of functionality on client-side, native applications (Rather than client-side web-based applications, such as Radio). As Wikis tend to say on submit: "Your attention to detail is appreciated". :-) Posted by: Diego at August 19, 2003 3:49 PMsharpreader is also fully recursive, not sure if that was mentioned above. Posted by: j at August 20, 2003 12:36 AMAnd now someone has hacked NetNewsWire to use the horizontal three pane view: http://rentzsch.com/notes/widescreenNetNewsWire Posted by: Matthew Walker at August 24, 2003 4:57 AMCopyright © Diego Doval 2002-2007.
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