Studio Blog Reader v0.1 (this is a copy of the About doc)



4/9/2004

Studio Blog Reader is a Notes-based RSS reader developed (for now) by WorkFlow Studios. This project has been donated to OpenNTF. The current version of the reader doesn't achieve all of the functionality of a true group based aggregator (rankings, sophisticated personalization, etc.), but serves as jumping off point for such features to be built in. It is, however, a full featured RSS reader with a couple of extras thrown in for good measure.



There are obvious advantages the Notes platform can bring to the individual blog reader concept. Server-based synchronization allows a user to work at an office and home computer and access the same data. Replication to a local Notes client allows an off-line capability. Since Domino can serve both a Notes client and a web client, the reader can also serve a dual purpose of being both a reader and a blog publisher in its own right.



When we initially conceived this project, the concept of a group RSS reader intrigued us. How could workgroups take advantage of something like this? If a reader database was created for a specific topic, then feeds could be aggregated for a workgroup. Then, members of the workgroup could create response docs (comments) as well as categorize and rank the individual stories. In addition, members could create subscription docs for specific categories or key words.



So, what does this version have in it. Users have the ability to:

Manually create channels

Categorize channels and set feed frequency and max number of stories to keep

Import OPML files

Export channels to an OPML file

Read feeds from both a Notes client

Automated feed updates via a server-based scheduled agent

"Publish to Blog" feature that allows user to publish a story to their Movable Type or Blogsphere system.

Read the full html version of a story even when off-line

View stories categorized by channel or in a calendar view by date.



Current plans for the next version:

Create a browser based interface. Currently it is a Notes only client. Must be a R6.x client, this will not work in R5.

Unread documents. There isn't any current capability to visually filter the content to just the documents you haven't read. This needs to be supported for both the Notes client, web client, and for authenticated users versus Anonymous users. The current thinking for Anonymous users would be to simply indicate the stories that have come in on the current day as being the "new" stories.

Currently, in the Notes client, when a user clicks on a story, it pulls up a cached copy of the story as a Notes document. Obviously, there are a number of items that don't render correctly when read this way (mostly images). If the page does some "call home" behavior, the Notes client will also complain about them. There is a button for opening the story via a browser, but the whole process could be improved.

Categorizing stories by date is a bit of a kluge as the feed agent brings in dates from a variety of feed formats. The XSL transformation doesn't attempt to deal with it currently. Determining whether stories are new or updated would also be improved by an improved XSL transformation.

Improve the XSL files used for the transformation of the RSS feeds. As noted above, date handling needs improvement. There is also an issue with some implementations of ATOM feeds.

Subscriptions. Individual users should be able to establish parameters for subscribing to the blog reader for specific content.

Categorizing and ranking stories. More thought needs to be put in about who decides the category or categories for stories, and a mechanism for avoiding save/replication conflicts needs to be devised (currently using the document locking mechanism).

RSS feed of categories including the Ranked category. When stories have been categorized or ranked, this provides a new organization of content that in and of itself could be a worthwhile RSS feed.



Notes on Using the Studio Blog Reader

There are four agents that need to be scheduled: The "Feed Reader" agent which retrieves the RSS feeds and turns them into stories, the "Retrieve HTML Stories" agent that gets the actual HTML of the story and places it in the story document (this allows offline viewing of the entire story, not just the abstract), the "Story Cleanup" agent which deletes stories based on the threshold set in the channel document (the oldest stories are deleted, it will not delete stories that are "Locked") and the "(Rolloff Log Records)" agent that deletes log documents that are more than 4 days old. NOTE: The agent signer must have level 3 security access.

If you want to use the "Publish to Blog" feature, you will need to create a user profile. This profile is used to set the connection information for your blog. Currently, only Movable Type and Blogsphere are supported. BlogSphere publishing will only work if the Blogsphere database is on the same server as the Blog Reader. A future version will change this by using XML-RPC to publish, but at this time we couldn't get Blogsphere to respond to XML-RPC calls.

There is a "Master Config" document where you can set the number of threads used by the "Feed Reader" agent and where you can turn on or off the HTML retrieval of stories.

WARNING: Do not delete or rename the XSL documents in the "XSL Files" view. These are used to transform the RSS from whatever standard it is in, to a RSS 1 compliant document that we can then more simply parse into the story documents. If you delete or rename these, then the reader will fail. Also, use caution in editing these or you may experience problems with the feeds. Bear in mind that these are documents.

The "Feed Log" view can be used to see the activity of several of the agents in the application. Errors on feeds will be displayed here.

The OPML Import can be used to import channels from other RSS readers. It does not, at this time, import the categorizations. Also, it adheres closely to standard, some variations will not import correctly.



How to contact us about the project:

E-mail us at studioblog@workflowstudios.com. You can also report bugs and request features on the OpenNTF Project Page. We are also eager to work with others on this project, if you would like to become a part of this project please contact us. Even if you are not on the team, but you do something cool with the app, send us a note and let us know what you've done, we'd love to see it.



Where to go for more info, updated templates, etc…

For the short term, we've created a web page at http://studioblog.workflowstudios.com. Again, if the project moves to OpenNTF, then that page will eventually point to the project there.



Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Ed Brill for a blog entry in November, 2003 that inspired the idea.

Thanks to OpenNTF for being there. Without the organization being in place, we wouldn't have started the project knowing we would be the only ones to support it. While we plan to add functionality, having others guide and assist via OpenNTF is very desirable.

Thanks to Declan Lynch for spearheading the Blogsphere template. Obviously the style in this project is directly borrowed from Blogsphere. Part of this was because we liked it, part of it was because we see potential for an eventual merger of reader and publisher templates.



Thanks for your interest in the reader, and we're glad to be contributing to those who are interested in RSS and Notes.

Lance Spellman

David Bockes

and the rest of the WorkFlow Studios team