parabola 0.5 review

parabola project is a browser-based news feed aggregator. parabola is written using Ruby on Rails and uses the FeedTools module fo

License: MIT/X Consortium License File size: 69K Developer: Martin Wulffeld

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parabola project is a browser-based news feed aggregator.

parabola is written using Ruby on Rails and uses the FeedTools module for all feed parsing.

What's New in This Release:
Ruby 1.8.2
Rails 1.0+
MySQL 4.1+
Rubygems
FeedTools 0.2.18+
acts_as_taggable 1.0.4+

Installation:

Database

Create a MySQL database called 'parabola_p'. Add a user with proper access to it:

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE parabola_p;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON parabola_p.* TO parabola@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'parabola';

Now initialize the database with the schema:

$ mysql -u parabola -p parabola_p < db/schema.mysql.sql

If you use a different username than 'parabola' and/or a different password than 'parabola' you should subsequently edit 'config/database.yml' to reflect that.

Now test by running the built-in webserver:

$ ./script/server -e production

If you can connect to http://localhost:3000/ and see a login form you are up and running.

Updating Feeds

A script called 'updatefeeds.rb' takes care of downloading feeds and updating the database according to your settings. It is located in the 'support/' directory.

You can run this manually but this gets rather boring after a while. Better to add it to whatever scheduling program you are using such as cron and have it run maybe once an hour. The script just needs to be pointed to the root of where you extracted parabola. Let's say it's in'/var/htdocs/parabola/'. You would then run it as such:

$ updatefeeds.rb -r /var/htdocs/parabola/

Make sure the entire 'public/cache/' is writable by the user which the script runs as. Below this directory favicons are stored.

Each feed is at maximum checked once per hour but you can give the script the -f option (for force) to force it to check each feed every time the script is run.

Using

If you use the special tag ':nfp:' on a feed its articles will not appear on the frontpage.

What's New in This Release:
This release deletes articles older than the 'keep days' setting for a feed, and articles with dates in the future are now set to current date and time.
It shows date on each article in the articles view, and a 'New feed' menu item has been added to be able to quickly add new feeds.
There are several major bugfixes.