New GreatNews Style

Friday, December 1, 2006 8:01 AM Filed under:

General

New GreatNews Style

I've mentioned my love for my RSS aggregator before, GreatNews. This week I came across a new user-submitted style for GreatNews called Web-2-Zero, created by Jorwa. This is a great looking style and is very pleasing to the eye - despite the name ;-)

Take a look:

Download Jorwa's Web-2-Zero GreatNews Style

There's a couple of things I didn't quite like about this style so I'm posting my own revised copy. The style posted by Jorwa was set to overflow into 2 columns, which is great for newspaper views, but for how I like to read (which is often posts with source code in them) I want to see the text in the full width, so I removed that. Jorwa's style also removed images from the text, again optimized for a newspaper view. I removed that as well. I also added a line after each post to separate each post when in a newspaper view and did a little different treatment for comments.

Download my modified Web-2-Zero GreatNews Style

Speaking of GreatNews. I still love it as much as ever. I did test out the new Jubilee build of RSS Bandit this week. While it does have some great features and looks nice, you just can beat the speed of GreatNews. RSS Bandit felt a bit sluggish in comparison. Keep up the great work Jack!

Comments

Dave Burke 12/1/2006 8:11 AM

Ryan, You're responsible for me moving to Greatnews about a year ago (or whenever you first posted about it) and I've been using it ever since. I just downloaded an update, which seemed to change my custom CSS, but a few minutes on a simple.CSS copy and I'm looking good again. I've really been pleased with Greatnews, actually.
Ryan Farley 12/1/2006 8:15 AM

Hi Dave!

There's actually an issue with the latest build on machines with IE7 which is why your custom CSS might not have displayed correctly. It's all about a change in DOCTYPE. Anyway, Jack mentioned a new build this weekend that fixes that.

I've been quite pleased with it myself!

-Ryan
Jeremy Brayton 12/1/2006 2:11 PM

A lot of RSSBandit's slowness is due to the .NET overhead. That and the heavy handed System.Xml stuff it utilizes. Store the data in a traditional database and it'd probably be an order of a magnitude faster without any optimization code necessary.

Is GreatNews going to be free forever or just free during the beta? I've been wanting to ditch RSSBandit for a while (sorry Dare) but I can't beat the "almost always free"-ness of it.
Ryan Farley 12/1/2006 2:26 PM

Hi Jeremy,

I'm not sure what Jack's plans are for whether GreatNews will always be free or not. There's been some talk on the forums of it going commercial "some day". That said, for now it is free, so I'm using it ;-)

GreatNews does use a SQLite database which might explain it's performance gains over RSS Bandit. I'm not sure I'd attribute it to being a .NET app, I'm 100% pro-.NET and have some really fast .NET apps. I also have full confidence in Dare's programming skills, so I wouldn't attribute that to lousy code or anything. RSS Bandit does have many more built-in features compared to GrearNews, which could cause some of the slowness I suppose, but really it just seems slow moving around from feed to feed in RSS Bandit for me (especially after using GreatNews)

-Ryan
Jack Pan 12/1/2006 4:44 PM

Hi Ryan, your modified version is pretty nice. I'm going to grab one :)

Hi Jeremy, there's no commitment GreatNews will be free forever. But I don't see I will quit day job to support GreatNews either. So it will be in this kind of unofficial freeware state for quite a while. GreatNews is a fun side project I picked up 3 years ago to keep my c++ skill in check. It's hard to leave behind a language I used since TC++ days.

-Jack