LZone - Liferea

Improved Unread Counters

Lars Windolf — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:42:16 +0000

For the 1.10 I decided to change the unread counters in the subscription list tree view. Until now the number of unread items was displayed in braces right behind the feed title in addition to the feed title displayed in bold font weight.

Before

Here is how it is looking in the releases so far:

There is a serious disadvantage that you only notice if you do not have much screen space. Imagine a netbook for example. There the subscription titles will be truncated as you won't spend much space on the left pane. And the first victim of the ellipsizing is the unread counter. But out of the three visual elements: favicon, subscription title and unread counter, only two are important. The favicon allows you to easily find the feed, and the only real information is the unread counter.

After

So have a look at this screenshot, especially the "tagesschau" subscription:

Actually a lot of applications especially in the Mac world do this already and I think Liferea also benefits. I'm aware that the change is a bit visually disturbing and I hope most users will still like it. I'm looking forward to your feedback!

PS: Round borders on the number background is sadly not possible with GtkCellRendererText.

Liferea 1.10-RC4 Released

Lars Windolf — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:25:30 +0000

There is a new release candidate for 1.10 with several bug fix
contributions. It also introduces a feature to convert Google Reader
subscriptions to local feeds to allow everyone to keep their item history.

Read more about it in the previous blog post!

The Changes:

* Added an option to convert Google Reader subscriptions
  to local feeds (Lars Windolf)
* Fixes SF #1080: segfault opening attachment due to incorrect g_free()
  (reported by Adam Nielsen)
* Fixes SF #1075: GLib warnings of "string != NULL" assertion failure
  (reported by Simon Kågedal Reimer)
* Fixes missing shading in 2-pane mode rendering
  (reported by Zoho Vignochi)
* Fixes search folders including comment items
  (reported by David Willmore)

A corresponding maintenance release for 1.8 will follow!

Save Your Google Reader Data with Liferea!

Lars Windolf — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:46:24 +0000

If you were using Google Reader synchronization with Liferea do not delete your subscription! Instead convert it to local subscriptions and keep all your item history.

To do so choose the option "Convert To Local Subscriptions" from the feed list context menu:

I hope this feature helps everyone who cares about the item history he has from his synchronized Google Reader subscriptions.

Two Important Notes

This feature will be included starting with release 1.8.15 and 1.10-RC4. Don't worry you can migrate all data even after Google Reader shuts down as all data is kept locally in the Liferea sqlite database. Just do not delete the Google Reader subscription in the meantime.
While the conversion is quite simple it is not perfect. There will be item duplication afterwards as the item id matching is not consistent. Google Reader item ids do not match the original item ids so Liferea will produce some duplicates right after converting. But only for those items overlapping at this moment. Please just mark them as read!

Liferea 1.8.14 and 1.10-RC3 Released

Lars Windolf — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:05:19 +0000

Following the previous releases this new stable and unstable release fix a problem with the TinyTinyRSS support which caused broken headline rendering.

Please upgrade if you use TinyTinyRSS!

Bug: Endless TinyTinyRSS Updates

Lars Windolf — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:35:52 +0000

If you experience not ending TinyTinyRSS feed updates or high load when using TinyTinyRSS subscriptions please upgrade to the newest releases 1.8.13 and 1.10-RC2 which solves this bug.

Google Reader Shutting Down

Lars Windolf — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:23:47 +0000

As it was covered widely in media most of you probably have heard that Google is shutting down Google Reader after 1st July 2013.

Will the Google Reader data be lost?

No. As it is implemented now once Google Reader is not available Liferea will present you only a Google Reader feed list element without a subscriptions subtree. This can happen when you have no network connectivity for example. The subscriptions are only displayed after a successful Google account login. Even when the subscription list is not shown Liferea will still have all data in the local sqlite database, so no headlines will be lost.

To allow everyone to still access the items a code change is needed. With this it will be possible to access the old headlines from the local cache DB even after the shutdown so you loose nothing. I hope to find time to work on this in the next weeks.

Any Migration Suggestions?

Well the best choice is for sure self-hosting a TinyTinyRSS instance. Since the shutdown announcement there also seems to be a huge move to Feedly, but be aware that this is the same vendor-lock as Google was! Remember the API shutdown of Bloglines more than two years ago?

First Liferea 1.10 Release Candidate!

Lars Windolf — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:41:12 +0000

Today sees the first release candidate for the new 1.10 series. Compared to the previous unstable release 1.9.7 it now provides a clean migration to GSettings, fixed support for TinyTinyRSS 1.6 and an improved player plugin.

Please help testing this release to get out 1.10!

The detailed changes:

    * Patch SF #3407290: Migrate to GSettings
      (by Mikel Olasagasti)
    * Patch SF #3579177: Change .desktop category to News;Feed;
      (by Stanislav Brabec)
    * Fix for Debian #668197: x-www-browser preference not working
      (David Smith)
    * Added slider and time display to media player plugin.
    * Added Google Plus to social bookmarking options.
    * Removing deprecated g_thread_init() call
    * Auto-enable plugins on migration
    * Added missing -a option to manpage
    * Updated manpage to reflect XDG path migration
    * Changing GSettings path from /apps/liferea to /org/gnome/liferea
    * Changes default download thread concurrency from 2 to 3
    * Fixes regression about using the GNOME default font
    * Improves all item/link launching menus to consistently provide
      three options: Tab, Browser and External Browser
    * Fixes SF #1037: Incorrect notifications for Google Reader
      (patch by David Smith)
    * Fixes SF #1048: Removed all feedvalidator.org references from FAQ
      and XSLT as it was reported to host malware.
      (reported by bkat)
    * Fixes SF #1041: Some GPLv2 license headers were outdated
      (reported by Emmanuel Seyman)
    * Fixes SF #1044: tt-rss API changed (we now support only 1.6 API)
      (patch by Sebastian Noel)
    * Fixes assertion when creating new tt-rss subscriptions
    * Fixes XHTML errors caused by extra  tags returned by tt-rss
    * Fixes missing item list update when browsing item URLs in Liferea

Liferea SOCKS Proxy Workaround

Lars Windolf — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:59:16 +0000

Liferea right now doesn't support SOCKS proxies. In Debian bug #272178 David Smith hints on how to workaround this. Full quote:

Just some information for people wanting to use Liferea with SOCKS.

I'd strongly recommend that you install the package redsocks. I've found that this works perfectly, not only for liferea, but for *ALL* other applications whether they support SOCKS or not, to tunnel all their traffic through a SOCKS (or SSH Tunnel) server.

It is no longer necessary, today, to build SOCKS support into every network application, even if you *MUST* use SOCKS. For this reason, it's unlikely liferea will ever get SOCKS support. There's just no reason for it.

I've just completed testing of liferea + redsocks through a SOCK5 connection created inside an SSH tunnel and it works just fine. I used the guide available here: http://dtbaker.com.au/random-bits/redirect-all-traffic-through-transparent-socks5-proxy-in-linux.html

Thanks for your time.

Liferea 1.8.12 Released

Lars Windolf — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:39:03 +0000

This is a new maintenance release of the 1.8 branch. This release makes Liferea compatible to the changes in the TinyTinyRSS 1.6 API. If you are using TinyTinyRSS please upgrade!

Here are the changes:

* Fixes SF #1041: Some GPLv2 license headers were outdated
  (reported by Emmanuel Seyman)
* Fixes SF #1044: tt-rss API changed (we now support only 1.6 API)
  (patch by Sebastian Noel)
* Fixes XHTML errors caused by extra  tags from tt-rss
* Update of German translation

Grab the newest release from http://lzone.de/liferea/.

TinyTinyRSS API Compatibility Restored

Lars Windolf — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:44:38 +0000

Syncing Liferea against the TinyTinyRSS news aggregator broke with the release of version 0.6 of TinyTinyRSS because of API cleanups. Thanks to a patch from Sebastian Noel it is now possible to sync to all version from TinyTinyRSS 1.5.3 to most recent 1.6.2.

The fix was released with Liferea 1.8.12. Please upgrade!