Tag Archives: orbital

Orbital Feed Reader 0.1.5 Codenamed “CHICKEN HAT” is out!

Dev, PHP,

It’s been a busy couple of months for me. I’ve had my first user feedback on Orbital Feed Reader – a fella who’s trying to use it on GoDaddy’s Awful Hosting. I haven’t fixed all of his issues but I’m getting closer. Lil Peanut has been smiling, grabbing things, laughing, and peeing on me.

http://instagram.com/p/fYqTrGjpqD/

What’s in 0.1.5? Some bug fixes, some UI fixes and a way to change the SORT ORDER!

Feed Names

When you put in a feed to autodiscover it will show you the actual feed names instead of just the feed URL. This is important because it lets you choose among many feeds in a smarter way.
Feed Names on Orbital

Sort Order

Henry Vitoski pointed out that most people will want to use Orbital differently than I do. I’m a completist, I like to start at the bottom and read EVERY SINGLE THING. The rest of you apparently are more interested in seeing new things first and then delving into the past. Now there’s a way to change the sorting. It will remember whatever you choose.
See more details at the changelog page.

Orbital Reader is live

Dev, Pals, wordpress, , ,

After a lot of subway rides and wednesday nights, you can now install the best feed reader for WordPress right from your wordpress admin panel.

Once you are logged into your wordpress admin screen:

  1. Click Plugins
  2. Click Add New
  3. Search the Codex for “Orbital”
  4. Install Plugin
  5. Activate Plugin

The plugin should show you where it is, tell you how to use it, and away you go!

THE WORLD IS yOURS

It’s early days on this thing, so please tell me what’s difficult, what’s wrong, what could be improved.

Ruined Cathedrals

Photos, , ,

This photo is of St. Quentin Cathedral in northern France, which burned down in August 1917.

via Unseen World War I photos: Destroyed Cathedrals.

A ruined cathedral is a special kind of place. All the synergistic work of man, all that drive to order and organization – laid back to chaos and dirt so quickly.

Speaking of the synergistic work of man, this is the first post I’ve ever made publicly from Orbital Feed Reader!

SVG icons in Orbital

Dev, , , , ,

Screen Shot 2013-08-06 at 5.51.25 PM

In Orbital Feed Reader I’m trying to make sure that I’m doing things in smart ways – I don’t have much time to work on it. One thing that people do when they create software is make icons – lots of them for different sizes. This has always seemed strange to me – most icons aren’t photos, so I don’t get the point.  There’s a graphics format called SVG – Scalable Vector Graphics  – that automatically resizes itself at any resolution.  It’s smooth and very small – and all modern browsers support SVG.

So I’m trying to use SVG for any icons that aren’t available as unicode symbols.

Those two icons are free icons for Feeds and OPML and they are both SVG.  This was such an easy choice that I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it. The only thing that was a little off is that the OPML icon had a little bit more blank space than I wanted, so I edited it in the free, open source SVG editor Inkscape. Here’s the new version I made.


Creative Commons License BY-SA 3.0
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The folks over at liquidorb made this icon available under a CC-BY-SA license so I’m giving them credit and making my derivative work available under the same license.

Unicode Icons in Orbital

Dev, wordpress, , , ,

Font icons are kind of fashionable in web development these days. What’s awesome about them is that you get all the clever wonderful benefits of how good browsers are at rendering webfonts. In a way, a web font used for font icons is like a png sprite for SVGs – you get one server round trip and then a bunch of reusable images.

It’s a good idea if you need to show some custom icons. Me, I’m too cheap for that. For Orbital I’m trying to make sure that there is a very small footprint. Rather than using a custom web font I’m just getting creative with the unicode tables.

Screen Shot 2013-08-06 at 5.40.43 PM

As far as I can tell, unicode has some pretty easy to understand symbols for add (+), refresh(⟳) and edit(✎). So I get decent, scalable icons for zero server round trips!

go read

Economics, Incentives, Save.the.world, , , ,

From this Gizmodo’s How a lone coder cloned google reader.

Go Read is a web-based RSS reader.It is designed to be as useful as Google Reader.

When you built your house on sand and then you find your house collapsed, it doesn’t seem so smart to rebuild your house on sand, but taller. So I just wonder about writing your google reader clone in a language designed by google and hosting it on a hosting platform run by google, where the only way to sign in is to use google.

Wordprss is now Orbital Feed Reader

Dev, Javascript, PHP, wordpress, ,

When I talked with Aaron about the name of the feed reader for WordPress I’m working on, he pointed out that it seems awfully close to the actual name WordPress. It also is impossible to say. I asked lots of folks for new name ideas, this is the one that stuck for me.

Orbital, because:

  • You can see a lot from orbit
  • I really like the band

  • It is easy to say and there isn’t a feed reader already named Orbital

In other news, I’m working with folks to install it on their servers and show them how to use it. Be my Alpha Tester, please!