I am one of the geeks behind Alertle. Its a web based RSS Reader. I am responsible for a good amount of the JavaScript areas of this app

Features

Single Page Application

The entire application is contained in a single page - everything is done through Ajax. I will not advice that you make something like this(its a maintenance nightmare) but I can say one thing about it - its Cool. With a capital ‘C’.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I got the idea of creating a Keyboard Shortcut Library for JavaScript when I was working on this feature.

Autoplay

You can view articles as you are viewing a slideshow if you enable this.

Feedpacks

You can bunch a group of feeds together into a feedpack - and see all the posts from such a group together.

Sharing

You can share your feedpacks with other users

Perfect for High Volume Feeds

There is one major feature that sets Alertle appart from other RSS readers - it does not tell you if a post is read or not. Yeah, first you will think its a missing feature - but its not. I have used a lot of feed readers - once you subscribe to a couple of high volume feed - like say, BoingBoing or Slashdot or something, you can say goodbye to your sanity. It creates so many new items that the only way of staying away the mess is to click on the ‘Mark all as read’ button once every four seconds. You know what I mean - I am sure you have unsubscribed from many feeds for this reason.

With alertle, you can subscribe all these high volume feeds. And there is no pressure to view all the posts.

If you are an info junkie, I can guaranty that your will get lost for hours in Alertle.

Problems

IE is not Supported

We are still working on this - and due to deadline constraints, we decided to release Alertle without IE support. So if you are an IE user, I am sorry - but What in the World are you Doing? Ditch that terrible browser and get a real browser right now!

If we can get a few people to switch to firefox before we add support for IE, I will say that Alertle gone beyond and above the call of duty to make the web a better place!

Posts don’t have a Read Flag (pun unintended)

Um., yeah, I know - this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This will prevent me from using Alertle for all my feeds. For my must-read feeds, I will still be using Google Reader. For the high volume stuff, I will use Alertle.

Getting to Know Alertle

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Alertle and sign up for an account. Its FREE!

But if you are still unconvinced, here is a demo…

Links

• Alertle
• Masable’s take on Alertle
• Alertle Blog
• Alertle Docs

Desktop and Web application needs icons. Icons make the app more usable than an all-text application. If you are building a desktop application, your framework may provide some stock icons. But if you are making a web application, you will need external icons.

I have seen a lot of pages that lists many icon sets…

• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
• Quality mini icons
• 90 Free Vector Icons Set
• The Top 50 Sources for Free Designer Icons
• Top 50 Supercool Free Icon Sets
• Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• Free Tiny Small Mini Icons Bullets
• Icon Finder - a search engine for icons

But when I want some icons I have a better place to look.

KDE and Gnome Icon themes.

I prefer using these icons because of the following reasons…

Multiple Size Icons

Most themes provide the same icon in various sizes. The available sizes are 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 22×22, 16×16 and sometimes even a scalable SVG set. Not all themes have all the sizes - but most have. I don’t have to tell you how useful this is.

Lots of Choice

KDE Look Icons page have 86 pages with 15 icon themes per page. That makes a total of 1290 icon sets. And I am not counting the Gnome Look Icons.

That’s a lot of choice. Granted, not all will be good. Not all will have the icon I am searching for. Not all have the size I way want. There will be some duplication. But its still a lot.

Free - in both sense of the word

Most of these icons uses GPL and LGPL licenses. So you can use if for your application without paying for them. You can modify them. You can share it with others. You can… you get the idea. The point is there are no restrictions.

Even if you are building a proprietary application, I think you can use the icons because you are not compiling it into the application. But I am not sure about that - if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment.

I have to warn you that not all icons sets use these licenses - so make sure you look at the license of an icon set before using it.

Great Icons

Most of the icons are created by professional designers. Sure there are some duds among the collection - but the majority of them are good.

Some Recommended Icon Sets

Crystal Project

Nuvola

Crystal Diamond

black + white icons

Crystal Clear

And there are hundreds more for you to find out…

Finally - the feature I most wanted in Google Reader has been added. Its official people - Google Reader has search.

I have no idea why they took so long to add this feature - its ironic that Google fails to provide the search option.

Results Sorted by Date

The main complaint I have about the search feature is that the results are sorted by date and not by relevance. The below picture will make this very clear…

I would prefer that it is sorted by relevance - at least provide an option for that.

More Information

• Offical Announcement
• Google Reader adds search!

In Nexty I used CSS to create a inexpensive templating system. You can see it in action in the settings page of Nexty. Currently I use it only for changing the icon sets. But you can change the colors and the layout using this system.

Before starting, I must say that CSS is not the most powerful solution for templating. Using a server side solution is much more recommended. But for my purposes, CSS was good enough.

(X)HTML Code

If you want to use CSS templating, your app must be semantically valid. In other words, there is no way you can theme a tag soup.

Make sure that the stylesheet used for templating appears at the last. This will make sure that all the rules in the above stylesheets can be overwritten easily. In Nexty, I have a base stylesheet, then the theme stylesheet and at the end the hacks stylesheet…

<link href="css/style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<link href=”images/themes/crystal/theme.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<!–[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/style_ie.css” type=”text/css” media=”all” />
<![endif]–>

PHP Code

Very little PHP is involved to creating this system - I depend on it just to change the path of the CSS Stylesheet. The code used is…

<link href="images/themes/<?=$theme?>/theme.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

The $theme variable will change if the user changes the theme.

If you are using sourceforge to host your project, be careful when using the web hosting provided by them - it’s session handler for PHP is broken. I learned this the hard way when I tried to set up a demo for my latest project.

Many other have found this problem as well. You you have actually gone through the SourceForge documentation, you will find that this issue is documented.

Nexty had this problem as well - but back then, I thought it was a problem with sourceforge’s caching mechanism. Now I know that it is an issue with their session management.

Just an FYI

As you already know, I have made my move. Moving from one domain to another is not new to me - I have moved a lot before. Here is a small picture that will show all my ‘domain hops’…

http://binnyva.bizland.com/ (Dead now) - My first site.

http://binnyva.tripod.com/ - Started using Tripod when Bizland stopped my free account.

http://www.geocities.com/binnyva/ - Tripod became very slow due to all their ads - so I moved to Geocities.

http://binnyva.blogspot.com/ - Decided that I have to get into this ‘blog’ thing.

http://www.bin-co.com/ - Finally, got a credit card - thus making it possible to by web space/domain. Once I got the card - I did not stop with just one domain - I bought some more…

• http://www.binnyva.com/
• http://blog.binnyva.com/
• http://www.openjs.com/
• http://www.bin-co.com/blog/

Serious articles from the next post…