Huddled Masses

KulRSS is a sidebar plugin (pronounced a??Cool RSSa?? for those of you who dona??t know how I pronounce my nick) for MyIE2 which allows you to view RSS feeds. I want to make clear again, that this is essentially a web-page which simply downloads RSS feeds and uses XSLTransformations to convert them to displayable form. Since web browsers wona??t let scripts write files on the local hard-drive, I used the MyIE2 plugin architecture to do that a?? This could be modified to use the FileSystemObject, (which is allowed in an HTA), however, since at the time I wrote it, I was using MyIE, it made sense to me to leave it as is.

I may, at some point, re-code this for Firefox, since that’s the browser I’m using now, but there are already a couple of RSS extensions for Firefox, and I’m honestly not that excited about RSS right now. All the stupid bickering over formats has me turned off, and it looks like for the future, an RSS parser that can’t parse ATOM isn’t much use, and I just don’t want to learn another format.

As always, this is free and open software. There is one thing you may want to have a look at right away, the rsslimit.xls file is used for the a??suma?? view (which is the default) to limit the number of headlines. The third line is where the number is stored, if you change the a??5a?? between the xsl tags there, you will change how many headlines are displayed from each feed in the summary page.

Please feel free to download the zip and unpack it to a directory named a??KulRSSa?? in your MyIE2\Plugins directory.

I made it so you can select a single feed or a??alla?? of them, and choose which xsl stylesheet you wish to apply. Ia??ve included a handful of stylesheets, but therea??s no end to what a little imagination can do with whata??s in here.

I hope you find it useful. Please read the readme a?? and feel free to send me more xsl stylesheets for inclusion. I still have a few features that should be done (particularly the auto-refresh) a??

Ia??ve left two significant features for a possible future version:

First, this actually downloads the files each and every time you change feeds or click the a??Suma?? button. Thata??s not really a good idea because of the extra traffic it sends to those servers (and the extra time it takes, on a dialup connection) but implementing time-based caching (and automatic downloading when necessary) was a significant extra step, so Ia??ve left it for version two. Second, all the actual formatting is being done by the xsl files, which could use some cleaning up, I actually borrowed them from someone else, and modified them a little (as youa??ll see from their copyrights, if you edit them yourself). Ia??d like to include some other a??looksa?? that would give you more flexibility, particularly one that imposes a strict limit on the ammount of content you would see from each news item.

4 Responses to “KulRSS 2.0 (RePost)”