feederator – Squix – TechBlog

Feederator, Kindle and PDF

Daniel Eichhorn — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:32:00 +0000

I’m using Feederator myself to send interesting posts to my Kindle to read it later. To do this you can simple drill into the detail view of a post. There you’ll find a social bookmarking widget, labled with “share”. In the popup select “more” and then search for instapaper. In order for this to work you need to setup an account at instapaper.com, but don’t worry, it’s free!

Another trick that I recently found out in connection with the kindle: if you want to send a PDF to your Kindle to your @free.kindle.com email address simply type “Convert” for the subject and add the PDF as an attachement. Amazon will then try to convert the PDF to an eBook suitable for Kindle

Plenty of new tricks for Feederator

Daniel Eichhorn — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 11:26:00 +0000

This weekend Feederator learned a lot of new tricks. In my opinion the coolest new thing is that Feederator adds a lot of additional data to each post. You get a website preview in the list with the feed items. In case of movie feeds this might even be a cover picture. You only get to see this if you are in “expanded” view mode. If the pictures annoy you – just switch to “list” mode in to upper right corner of the item list. Here’s a screenshot of the current interface:

Another cool thing: if you click on the blue links under the post title you get to see all your items that have this tag as well…

New Features: Searching the archive

Daniel Eichhorn — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 13:50:00 +0000

I’m trying to improve Feederator.org. Sometimes changes are rather invisible to the end user. Sometimes new features extend the use of feederator rather dramatically. I enabled such a feature today: searching the archives with full text key words.
To keep your inbox clean Feederator moves items older than 3 days to the archive. Once they are in the archive you can search for them. Make sure that your most significant word comes first, otherwise it might be omitted. The search is not as good yet as Google but it is getting better. Indexed words are part of the title of a post and its categories. In addition the MIME Type of the attachment will also be indexed. Entering “2010 nzb dvdrip” will return with a list of items containing 2010 and dvdrip in the title and having a usenet enclosure.
In the time of this writing there are already more than 20’000 torrent items and more than 15’000 nzb items indexed.

Other new features:

Social bookmarking items: share items that you like with your friends in Twitter, Facebook and others
Drag And Drop: by dragging an item with the dotted handle to a feed label on the left you can copy that item to a new feed. This also works with search results: you can search for movies and once you found one that you like you can drag it to the feed that your downloader has subscribed to

Combine Feederator and Sabnzbd+ to a One-Click-Download tool

Daniel Eichhorn — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:13:00 +0000

Sabnzbd+ is a great tool if you are riding the usenet wave. Feederator on the other hand is a great tool to manage and moderate (RSS) feeds. This post will show you how to use the two tools to have a one click (movie/series/ebook) download tool.
First of all you need a usenet account. I’m using supernews (http://www.supernews.com/) which will cost you between $10-$12 per month. Use Google search to find special offers for $9.99. Then download Sabnzbd+ and install it on the system of your choice. On how to set up sabnzbd+ please have a look at the brilliant article on lifehacker.com
So far so good, you can now download stuff from usenet by looking for nzb files and add them to your download list, but that’s boring, right? And most of all, how do you add new items from your computer at work or while you are traveling? Here is where feederator.org comes into play. To get an automatic download system you normally would get sabnzbd+ to subscribe directly to a RSS feed containing nzb’s. You would be able to filter content by regular expressions to put them into the proper folders. But you wouldn’t be able to handpick things you wanted to download. Either the Regex matches and you get everything or it doesn’t and you might miss some block buster movies.

Getting the RSS URL
Instead of directly subscribing to a feed you will put Feederator in between. But first things first. First of course you will need the URL of a RSS feed with usenet content. You can subscribe to http://www.nzbsrus.com and download a few items per day for free. If you like the service you can become a VIP member (for about $10 for ten years). But for testing you just need to subscribe there. Once registered and logged in you can pick the address of your feed from the RSS section.

Setting up Feederator
Open a new browser tab and navigate to http://www.feederator.org. For this web application you only need a Google Account. Feederator runs on the Google App Engine and uses the Google service to authenticate you. But don’t worry, Feederator will never see your Google credentials it will only be told that you are who you seem to be.
Once you logged in you need to subscribe to that RSS feed from before. Click on the “Add subscription” button on the top left:

Feederator after your first login – Click Add Subscription

The dialog should look like this:

Let me explain the form:

the name is important, since it will be part of the new URL of your feed
the description doesn’t matter, but will be visible in the new RSS feed
Is this feed private: I checked this, because feeds from nzbsrus.com have a private key that identifies you as the downloader. You don’t want this key and feed to be visible to others. If you check this box the feed won’t be visible on the front page nor published anywhere else. But be aware that this is no real protection from others using your feed. You just won’t run around and brag about it
URL: the url of your feed. This can be any valid ATOM or RSS feed

Now click save.

After a short while feederator will load the current items of that feed:

Above the items on the header bar you can see the URL of your new feed. In this case it’s
http://www.feederator.org/feeds/shelph78/movies
Your URL will be put together like this as well: http://www.feederator.org/feeds/–username–/–feedname–
Now click on that link. Depending on the RSS capabilities of your browser you might see something like this:

Wow, an empty feed. That’s fancy! Let’s go back to feederator and press the grey “publish” button beside one of the items. It will turn orange:

Now load again the feed URL:

OK, you have to admit, that’s pretty cool. With just one click you added a movie to an RSS feed. And this feed is exactly what sabnzbd+ will see.
Go back to your sabnzbd+ interface. Go to configure -> RSS
Now add your brand new feed URL:

And press add. Voila! Your done. From now on you can frequently check feederator for new movie feeds. If the title of an item you can see its details by clicking on it.

Feederator helps you
Sometimes feederator will even find fan art and additional descriptions about the movie or series. This feature is still under development. So don’t be suprised if feederator shows you the wrong movie or series information or none at all.

You can help feederator
I develop Feederator just for fun and it’s only me. I don’t have a squad of testers around that check new releases. So please, if you find a bug report it using the feedback tool. This is essential to make feederator better. Do you miss a feature, no problem, just tell me about it.