Enough talking about actual project ideas. It’s time to get a hacking.

Last night I started working on the aggregator I talked about. A Firefox extension, it will keep the best parts of the .NET based RSS Bandit and leave out the bad (namely the dependence on .NET and IE).

The Main Tutorial for XUL on XULPlanet is a decent guide, and following it I began to quickly layout my interface. The first problem I encountered though was that the once I loaded up the extension, any changes to the code would not appear until I RESTARTED Mozilla.

I googled up a solution. By default, Mozilla caches the XUL interfaces. A configuration property named nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache must be set to true to stop this from happening. Enter about:config in the browser’s address bar to access those settings.

Of course, clicking around the site, I thought I had found bigger, better instructions than on XUL Planet explaining the new extension. I proceeded to waste 2 hours trying to follow them with no success. Grrr. Turns out I must functionally illiterate cause I missed the part saying the instructions for the new extension framework for Firefox 1.1! BAH!

Once I returned to the XULPlanet tutorial, thing progressed more quickly. I laid out the main areas. So with I pride I reveal the start of …

Electrocock!!! (heh heh)

Very bland at the moment, I know, but my main interest is to get the functionality up and running.

Here are the “stories” that will make up the next iteration of this project.

New feed

The user chooses the New feed command from the Feed menu, the tool bar, or by right-clicking on the feed area. A dialog pops up where the user enters the feed URL and title and clicks OK to create the feed.

Look at a feed

A user selects a feed in the Feeds area. The downloaded items of that feed are listed in the Feed Items.

Update feed

The user right clicks on a feed. The feed is read, and the newest items are added in the Feed Items areas.

Very basic functionality, but the foundation of everything I want. I am going to be busy this weekend helping out at the Canadian National Expo, so I probably won’t get a chance to hack anything until next Tuesday. So I am going to target September 9th to get something out here. Other tasks will include setting up a repository for the code. Though somehow I don’t think the mozilla team will appreciate the name of my program