Another change to MyRSS (1 Viewer)

[civikdude]

I've just checked the latest (mediaportal-cvs-08-19-2005--23-49.rar) and the MyNews chanes are in that.

Andy

Hi Andy,

I just downloaded mediaportal-cvs-08-22-2005--19-33.rar but the "My News" plugin looks exactly as it did before. And since I wasn't sure whether your plugin was a replacement for My News or a new plugin altogether, I browsed the plugin list for a new entry (i.e., "My RSS"). What do I have to do to locate/activate this plugin?

Thanks for your time,
Aaron

 

[civikdude]

:?

Can anyone direct me where to find this plugin? Thanks!

 

[AndyQ]

:?

Can anyone direct me where to find this plugin? Thanks!

civikdude,

Its in the current CVS version (definately is there). How you can tell? Well, the RSS plugin is really known as My News, so if you go to My News, you should have a select feed button on the left. If when you select it, it pops up a window with the available feeds in it then you have the latest version of the plugin.

Andy

 

[civikdude]

Well, the RSS plugin is really known as My News, so if you go to My News, you should have a select feed button on the left. If when you select it, it pops up a window with the available feeds in it then you have the latest version of the plugin.

Terrific!! I understand now that they're one-in-the-same.



Suggestions / Feature Requests

When selecting My News, then hitting left arrow, it'd be nice to have the highlight bar land on "Select Feed" instead of "Refresh", since the Select Feed option is probably more widely used.

It would be nice to have control over the order of the RSS feeds, as they appear on the GUI, either via a "Sort by" button on the My News module or via the setup utility. The Sort by option would probably require a rewrite of the GUI where the first page would display all the RSS feeds available, and the second would be the drill-down into the selected feed. Very similar to the look and feel of the My Pictures module, with the "View" and "Sort by" buttons on the left, the feed titles on the right. The Setup screen option would add a control to the setup module to place the RSS feeds in the desired order, then Save/Done will write them in that order to the MediaPortal.xml file.

Another idea is to change the way RSS feeds are loaded, simply by loading the feeds from a directory of hyperlinks. This would eliminate the need to enter the URLs into the setup screen (and, subsequently, the MediaPortal.xml file). The directory would contain all hyperlinks, such as "http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss". The GUI would then look very similar to the My Pictures module, as described above, allowing one to change the view (list, icons) and sort method.

Making the module more like the My Pictures plugin (and others) would provide more real estate on the screen when displaying the actual RSS feed. Drill down to article, Escape back.

Again, these are just ideas. Thanks for providing this plugin!

Aaron

 

[waeberd]

Good suggestions Aaron, thanks!

 

[tomtom21000]

Another idea is to change the way RSS feeds are loaded, simply by loading the feeds from a directory of hyperlinks. This would eliminate the need to enter the URLs into the setup screen (and, subsequently, the MediaPortal.xml file). The directory would contain all hyperlinks, such as "http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss". The GUI would then look very similar to the My Pictures module, as described above, allowing one to change the view (list, icons) and sort method.

Aaron

Just keep in mind that you still would want to give the feed a friendly name and associate a thumbnail to it. So I don´t know if this can be done with the directory thing. And how would you set a feed up from within mp without entering the url?

tomtom

 

[civikdude]

Hi tomtom,

give the feed a friendly name

Because the directory would contain hyperlinks, i.e., Windows shortcuts, the shortcuts can be renamed, while preserving their specific URL address. Using CNN as an example, I renamed the hyperlink from its default to something a bit more descriptive:

associate a thumbnail to it

Oftentimes, a web site will provide its own icon for use with its URL. Otherwise, one could change the icon using the Windows properties "Change Icon" feature. For example, CNN provides their own URL icon, which is used when creating the hyperlink shortcut:

how would you set a feed up from within mp without entering the url?

I foresee something very similar (again) to the My Pictures setup screen, where you enter a directory (or directories) containing the hyperlinks:

This is where MP would scan for the RSS feeds, find the name of the feed, and display appropriately.