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Horizontal scrolling 
David Seidel is testing NewsRiver and mentions he'd like "a way to customize the new display, such as by attaching a CSS stylesheet. I don't want to do very much as this point, just eliminate horizontal scrolling, which makes it harder for me to read."
I wonder which feeds cause this and if it's a common enough problem that the main table ought to have a fixed width.
I get it now
After consuming feeds in the river for a few days I see what Dave was saying in the support.opml.org comments about not needing the check-all feature. You just let stuff age off the page. Think of it as a blog.
Paper boy
 Has a paper boy or girl ever been used as a metaphor for a feed reader? Later... there's an open source aggregator called Paperboy RSS. Way too apt never to have been conceived of.
Or how about a feed bag? Nah, that's probably not too mainstream. Just thinking out loud.
Or how about a dog who's just fetched your paper and is bringing you the news?
Enough! Enough already. Time to go back to work tomorrow and I have to shuffle this stuff down deeper into the pile.
Cross-blog conversation
Amy Gahran on blog comments. See subhead "3. Where is it spreading?" This relates to something I keep droning on about here: a collective comments space for a community of bloggers.
What I don't like about blog comments for discussion is that they're usually not threaded. Because they're linear -- like a guestbook, remember those? -- they discourage conversation among visitors. At least that's my opinion. Proponents of linear and threaded discussion are both stubborn about it.
I think to solve some of Amy G's concerns you have to learn from message board users and operators and programmers. A lot of this stuff is already figured out.
Forgot something
Darn, I was going to make the header clickable to take you home when you're the particular feed view in NewsRiver. I miss having some kind of navigation, even though it's not really necessary. You can go back and forth between home and feed view with the browser buttons, and you can unsub from the feed view page. It might be nice to have a link to the view subscriptions page. That way you wouldn't have to go back to the OPML editor at all.
Eh
New stylesheet for News River. I don't know. This may be a little precious. I do love my duckies; they seem just delighted to be bringing me the news, so friendly -- they might well be quacking "Turkey in the Straw." But the page colors are kind of matchy-matchy, Easter, kindergarten.
I used some of the classes already embedded in the table tags for the content. It appears to override anything specified in the prefs tables, which is good if Dave ever wanted to go to a more fully CSS template, because the colors and stuff could stay in there; it's not hurting anything. The header is done without a table (it's an ID in H1, which means you also have to edit the template for this one), but there are an awful lot of tables embedded in the code.
Dave, are you at all up for evolving away from tables? I'm not a CSS fanatic. I can't count the number of times I've said, "Oh, screw it" when I'm trying to format something in CSS and it's not happening and I know I can do it in a table in 5 seconds flat and I'll be done with it. I used to work with a guy who would spend two days figuring it out rather than relent.
But replacing tables with CSS page formatting for some of the basic structural elements would make for a lot more flexibility. For example, if somebody ever wanted to tuck NewsRiver into a sidebar of a local "my desktop" sort of app, it would be nice if the information now presented horizontally in a table row could be stacked vertically.
Some open source LAMP apps like the Moodle learning management system are doing dynamic stylesheets, which make things extra flexible, but it also notched up the difficulty level for a non-coder. I wouldn't think you'd want or need to go to that degree of complexity with it. No good if the teacher (or news consumer) can't customize on her own. Simple, right? Dialog box that says: "pick your skin," and you do and you're done and you're happy and ducky.
Here's the duck sheet.
ducks - paste in newsRiverWebsite.#styleSheets
| | Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif |
| | Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif |
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