My Google Reader replacement

Published 2013-09-26, 14:48

After Google closed their RSS reader I of course was looking for a web based replacement for it. Wanting more a  „river of news“ than Pinterest or „Let us decide what you want to read“, the search actually got quite complicated – many of the new reader replacements popping up didn’t match my requirements, and even if they looked like they did, most of the time they were broken or not really thought through.

A more structured list of my requirements:

I used ReplaceReader, Russel Beattie’s Readerpocalypse-the-Players-article, this epic list and some Google searches to find the following list of replacements:

Feedly, free

Very feature complete. Sometimes strange UX, quite often doesn’t really save read progress. But has an API that is supported by the biggest iOS readers.

TheOldReader, free

Matches the old Google Reader very closely. Didn’t scale well in the first days after the shutdown, actually seems to closely related to Google Reader to innovate.

Aol Reader, free

Big company, good designers. Makes a great rss reader with a perfect design. Shame they needed sooooo looooong to offer users to reorganize their imported feeds. Small feature, big frustration if it’s missing.

Digg Reader, free

See what I wrote about Aol Reader.

Newsblur, limited free, $2/month, $24/year

Oldie but a goodie. Works great, but I don’t like parts of the interface.

Feedbin, $3/month, $30/year

Ben Ubois created one of the newer Google Reader alternatives, and he did a pretty good job. I really like the general style of the product, but really dislike the user of tags instead of folders and the missing ‚complete articles river‘ view.

Yoleo, free (or $9/year donation)

„the beautiful reader“ is it’s tagline, and Jamie Gilgen did a really good job at that. Unfortunately, she also made some very strange decisions and the river of articles, or „waterfall“ as she calls it, is still missing.

Curata Reader, free

„The Cleanest Reader“. Yup, but also missing lots of the functionality I want.

Feedspot, free, $3/month, $24/year

Again, most of the stuff of Google Reader (and more) works and looks pretty decent.

Commafeed, free

„Bloat-free feed reader“. Support the most important stuff, but is also quite slow.

Hive, free

„Content first, no distractions“

Bloglovin, free

Works, pretty, but also not flexible enough. Very Pinterest/fashion oriented.

kouio, free

Prettyyyyyy. But no river view and not really made for lots of folders.

Others

More great readers, but didn’t really bring anything new to the table beside variations in design and which features were or were not supported:

Tiny Tiny RSS

Because it actually looks good I also decided to include this self hosted reader.

So which one did I choose? Feedly. It just worked when all the others had scaling problems and it supports all the features I need. It’s not perfect, but now I’m used to it.

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Wikipedia Mobile #1

Published 2012-04-08, 02:00

This morning I accidentally installed Wikipedia’s mobile app on my iPad. It felt sluggish, strange and not at all what I expected. As bitching doesn’t help and I wanted to use my professional knowledge in my free time, I started poking around. This is the result.

Starting position

The iOS Wikipedia app has really bad ratings. Users complain about bad performance, bad usability and about the feeling that this is more an Android app but an iOS app. In sum, this creates you a rating of only 2 stars for the current version. Ouch.

Android users seem to be happier with their 4.5 star rating. The problems only exists with the iOS version of the (similar) app. Strange. Let’s start with the basics and look into the feature set:

Doesn’t sound too bad. It’s not only stuff a mobile web site could do, so an app makes sense. So lets start to investigate.

What’s the background of all that?

The AppStore description of the app also links to a Twitter account and the source code of the app on Github:

From these two links I basically spent hours reading, clicking, reading again – typical procrastination stuff (Procrastinators beware if you are even near Wikipedia articles…). But I learned a lot 😉 Back to topic: The following links all are relevant to the mobile efforts of Wikipedia:

While reading these pages, I noticed information about two different iOS apps: One is based on Rhodes, one on Phonegap. It turns out the Phonegap version for iOS is quite new and the old one is to be retired and phased out:

So we have several projects and initiatives in the mobile space of Wikipedia:

Not too bad. Of course the articles in the wiki are quite… organically grown and sometimes hard to differentiate and classify. But I think that’s the case most of the time when volunteers and professionals work together.

The funny stuff: code

Now I have an overview, so let’s get back to the funny stuff: code.

As I have never used git before, I spend some time installing all the tools and learning how to use them. After that I can finally checkout the repository on Github. While I do this, I notice that the README.md isn’t as pretty as all the readmes of the other Github projects I know. So that’s the first thing I decide to fix. 1 hours, lots of reading and 3 minutes of ‚coding‘ and a pull request later, it is done. My commit gets integrated by reedy a few minutes later. I’m in.

But now to the real code. The folder structure of the repository isn’t very clear. There are lot’s of confusing files in the root that don’t really belong there in a multi platform project, several folders that also don’t make sense to me or I can’t identify. Again, this seems to have grown over time. This is definitely something that could and should be fixed.

In /assets/www I find something that looks like the html application. Loooots of Javascript, jQuery and Zepto *confused. Anyway, using –disable-web-security I can open the Phonegap app in Chrome and even get it working! Still, several ‚file not found‘ as non-existant files are requested. But here it becomes quite clear, that the app itself is no bad in itself. It works, the code is more or less structured, you can see what the developer was thinking. Normally that’s a good thing. So as to not fish around without all information, I conclude my little poking session for today.

Conclusion

After getting this short glimpse into Wikipedia Mobile I think that the code isn’t the first problem to fix. First it needs some love in the Documentation and Organization of the code. So that’s where I will start. Let’s see what I can do.

PS: Well, I installed the app on my old iPod 3 (iOS 4.2.1) and tried to use it – completely unuseable. Maybe we should start with the code after all.

Topic(s): Kram, Mobile, Technik No comments - :(

iPhone-Apps analysieren

Published 2012-04-06, 22:55

Heute habe ich ein paar iPhone-Apps auseinander genommen und sowohl Funktionsweise als auch Datenverkehr näher angeschaut.

Grundlagen

http://www.uptill3.com/static/iphone_forensics.pdf

Dateien auslesen

http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

(Binary) Plist Dateien anzeigen

http://www.icopybot.com/plist-editor.htm

Cookies.binarycookies

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/locutus/understanding-the-safari-cookiesbinarycookies-file-format-49980

SQLite Datenbanken anschauen

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/

Web-Traffic nachvollziehen

  1. http://www.charlesproxy.com/
  2. iPhone und Rechner in selbes WLAN
  3. Rechner-IP:8888 als Proxy der WLAN-Verbindung im iPhone einrichten
  4. Session capturen

SSL-Web-Traffic nachvollziehen

  1. Proxy -> Proxy Settings -> SSL -> Enable SSL Proxying
  2. Locations mit den entsprechenden Domaisn füllen
  3. Help -> Install Charles CA SSL Certificate -> Details -> In Datei kopieren -> Per Mail an iPhone senden und installieren

Vorsicht, besser nicht zu sehr bei der Installation von Apps benutzen, ich war heute 2 Stunden vom AppStore ausgeschlossen 😉

Mit dem Setup kommt man schon recht weit und kann doch so einiges lernen.

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Kurze Analyse von Forge of Empires

Published 2012-03-29, 15:30

InnoGames hat mit Forge of Empires ein neues Browser-Aufbaustrategie-Spiel veröffentlicht. Logischerweise habe ich mir das ein wenig genauer angeschaut:

Technik

 Allgemein

Performance-Optimierung am Beispiel: betamode.de

Published 2012-03-22, 20:07

Ich habe mich ein wenig mit Performance Optimierung von Webseiten beschäftigt. In den nächsten Tagen und Wochen werde ich einige Beiträge dazu veröffentlichen. Den Anfang macht diese Beschreibung des Optimierungsvorgangs von betamode.de:

Beispielseiten für Optimierung

Ausgangssituation

Erste Beobachtungen und Auswertung

Optimierung

Anwendbare Regeln aus High Performance Website Sites:

Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests

Folgende Bilder können zusammengefasst werden:

Schritte:

Ergebnis

Rule 3 – Add an Expires Header

Mit W3 Total Cache lässt sich sich das wunderbar erschlagen.

Ergebnis

Rule 6 – Put Scripts at the Bottom

Das Analytics-Script ist zwar schon ganz unten, aber noch das alte synchrone. Also mal das neue besorgen und einbauen.

Ergebnis

Rule 10 – Minify JavaScript (+ HTML + CSS)

Javascript gibt es keines, aber für Minify von HTML und CSS kann einfach W3 Total Cache konfiguriert werden, fertig.

Ergebnis

Dann zum Abschluss noch ein bisschen serverseitiges Caching um DB-Anfragen und so weiter zu minimieren mit W3 Total Cache.

End-Ergebnis

Tadaa, schnell.

Wireshark: Copy content of compressed requests

Published 2012-03-07, 17:40

Copying the content of a request compressed by using gzip is not easy in Wireshark:

  1. Click the request you want the content from
  2. In the Middle panel, click „Packet Details“
  3. Collapse all branches
  4. Right click on last Branch (Could be „Line-based text data: text/html“ or „Media Type“)
  5. Click „Copy“
  6. Click „Bytes (Printable Text Only)“

Now you have the content in your clipboard and paste it where you want.

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Anwendungen und Tools zum Monitoring und Graphing von Serverdaten (Load, Memory, Traffic)

Published 2011-07-31, 18:19

SAAS:

Self-hosted:

Ergänzungen willkommen.

Topic(s): Technik 1 single comment - :/

Fix ugly fonts in Firefox 5

Published 2011-06-27, 09:40

  1. about:config
  2. gfx.direct2d.disabled auf true setzen
Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Secure XAMPP: only local connections

Published 2011-03-25, 12:23

1) Open file xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf and replace

Listen 80

with

Listen 127.0.0.1:80

2) Open file xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-ssl.conf and replace

Listen 443

with

Listen 127.0.0.1:443

3) Open file xampp\mysql\bin\my.cnf|.ini and put in

bind-address=localhost

directly after [mysqld] (NOT [mysql]!)

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Dual-boot a hackintosh with Windows 7

Published 2010-07-07, 10:26

http://thebackpackr.com/hackintoshing-with-snow-leopard/
http://www.chip.de/news/Microsoft-Tool-Windows-7-vom-USB-Stick-installieren_38622482.html

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

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