Friday, September 10, 2010

Get the latest craze and news via RSS on your Console

Browsing and visting my favorite websites on the internet is one of the fond things I commonly do. This has been a habit every morning to be abreast with the latest whether it’s pertaining to locals, world news or tech updates.

Those where the days

I admit it, I still do miss the news paper delivered by the lazy paper carrier every morning at our front door. With the fast growing of the technology epecifically the internet almost all the things and news that i wanted is all over it.

Gone are the days when i had to remember all the sites I had visit, bookmark a favorite website for tips and tricks , then read the articles that might interest me.

Today, the RSS helps me a lot in consolidating these news and articles in one place/folder, I have other use of my memory and then I can read such articles any time of the day.

What is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?

In layman’s term you dont need to visit or find each website for that update or article, it is fed to you.

More of RSS in this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

RSS on Console

The tool that i have installed on my KahelOS for my RSS when I am in my console mode is the feed reader called “newsbeuter”

More of newsbeuter

Getting Started

Installing newsbeuter is very simple and straight forward on my KahelOS, just launch your terminal and Install newsbeuter using pacman command.

Figure 1: Installing newsbeuter

Now, you can manage your feed subscription by adding the feed url on the ~/.newsbeuter/urls file.

This can be done using your favorite text editor (vi,vim,pico etc.)

Or simple use echo command

eg. if i want to subscribe to 8layer blogs with the ff: URLS

http://labs.cre8tivetech.com/rss

http://www.8layertech.com/rss_blogs.php

Again with the echo command,

Figure 2: Adding/subscribing feeds

You can add more RSS efed URL if you want.

Now you are ready to run the program; just invoke “ newsbeuter” command then it will automatically prompt you to

Figure 3: Running newsbeuter application

Figure 4: Viewing your feeds

One of the good things about this application is that it is very easy to use. The commands below the screen are your guide to read news feed.

Q-quit
ENTER-Open
N-Next
(Shift+N)-Back
r-reload
R-Reload All
A-Mark Read
C-Catchup

Newsbeuter and More

You can also view your Google reader feed using this small tool. The trick is to add these lines on your “~/.newsbeuter/config

urls-source “googlereader”
googlereader-login “your-googlereader-account”
googlereader-password “your-password”

eg. $vim ~/.newsbeuter/config

then insert these lines above.

Just save the config files and start “ newsbeuter”

Figure 5: Starting your newsbeuter with Google Reader


Figure 6: Viewing your feeds

I also suggest that one has to consult the newsbeuter manual and its online documentation for other tips and trick about this tool
$ man newsbeuter

http://www.newsbeuter.org/doc/newsbeuter.html

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