Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll

1.1 Introduction

Feed on feeds is the core of Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll. Most of the credit, the work, and the effort is due to that.

So what makes afraabr different from FeedOnFeeds?

I hacked it a lot. First for myself. Then I realized what I could do with it. I floated the idea and got some interest. So I figured I’d go with it.

What, specifically, did I realize that I could do with it, you ask?

I hated having to “manage my subscriptions” or “update my blogroll”. These seemed like such tedious chores. So the idea behind afraabr is that you don’t have to do any of that. When you find a site/feed you might be interested in, you subscribe to it. When you know you have a feed you’re already subscribed to that you’re interested in, you click on it and refresh it. You can look at all the feeds you’ve ever accessed by title, by most recently accessed, and by most frequently accessed.

See how this helps you not need to “manage your subscriptions” ? Just like using a link blog instead of your browser bookmarks enables you to “blog and forget” and not have to “manage” it, so too, the ability to see the subscriptions as ordered by recently accessed enables you to “subscribe and forget”.

Now, for the not needing to “update your blogroll”. afraabr keeps a log of every feed you’ve refreshed and every feed item that you’ve read. The provided displayBlogRoll.php file merely shows those such items, for the past week, and only once per item. But if you know just a little PHP or MySQL, you can adjust that substantially.

 

1.2 Requirements

  • PHP (some decent version, I’ve only tested it with 4.3.3)
  • MySQL (some decent version, I’ve only tested it with 4.0.18)

 

1.3 Installation

  1. Unpackage the directory,
  2. edit the config.php file to include the name of the database and the username and password to connect to it. afraabr does not require a separate database of its own, and so may share one with, for example, server-side blogging software, etc….
  3. ensure the cache directory is given permissions such that PHP can write to it (typically needs to be given permissions for everyone to write to it – Unix octal convention would be 777
  4. run the install.php script and follow the directions

 

1.4 Uninstallation

  1. run the uninstall.php script and follow the directions

 

1.5 Notes

As described at http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/ it is highly recommended that you use some mechanism (such as use of the dot htaccess file) to restrict access to afraabr (or FeedOnFeeds, for that matter).

Unfortunately, if you do this, the provided displayBlogRoll.php file will not work. Actually, it needs some adjustment as is anyway. The top few lines that say

ini_set("include_path",ini_get("include_path").":/path/to/your/afraabr/installationDirectory");

should be adjusted so that /path/to/your/afraabr/installationDirectory is instead the actual server path to wherever it is that you installed afraabr.

 

1.6 License

Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll Copyright (C)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

 

1.7 Download

The current version (0.9 beta 1) can be downloaded at https://www.andrewsw.com/downloads/afraabr.tar.gz