After all the development (and not as much testing ;)), I desided to open up preprocessing configuration tool.

This part of the interface allows you to control how feed items get processed for you and there are currently 6 modification modules:

• Link from description (regex) - useful when feed owner is putting a link to some intermediate page but feed item always containg destination link.
• Remove part of the descriptio (regex) - useful when blog owner annoys you with some content that is not really useful.
• Feed Friends toolbar - all links get wrapped into a frame with “share” button on it so you can easily share the item with Feed Friends. Uses my first CPAN module - HTML::LinkChanger (Enabled by default).
• Header and Footer - simple modules adding arbitrary HTML on top and at the bottom of the items just in case you want to write something over there.
• In-feed Controls - module, I was writing about some time ago which adds links to popular services that can do something with item link/title like del.icio.us, Digg and Feed Friends of course. (Enabled by default)

There are also a couple of modules that filter out some news items by Title or Description regex in case you don’t want to see all of the news in the feed.

Feel free to change some configurations, e.g. add/remove some In-feed controls - you’ll see the results next time your feeds will get updated, fetched and preprocessed. You can also disable a module by clicking “Disable” next to enabled module as well as revert configuration to global defaults, if you changed it, by clicking “Reset”.
P.S. This is essentialy a core of Feed Preprocessor and I’m open to suggestions for more preprocessing modules which will be much easier to add.

P.P.S. Please keep in mind that Feed Preprocessor only affects feeds that you added to a feed list and reading by you feed reader - it preserves original items intact when you share them.

P.P.P.S. Load and other issues might force me to remove some of the modules in the future. Let’s consider it BETA.

In preparation to next development phase (remember that preprocessing configuration interface?) I rewrote large chunk of code in more object-oriented way then it was originaly done (release early makes it’s evil deed).

So it’s quite possible that some functionality got broken even though I tested the code after the change.

Please let me know if you notice some sudden problems with the service.

P.S. I’m also preparing a new hosting for the service so I hope for significant performance increase.

I’m working on configuration manager for Feed Preprocessor to give you more control over your feeds.

Some time ago I’ve added an interface for global configuration (I never posted about it because only I can see it) and today I changed how one of preprocessing modules work and changed some global preprocessing configuration that you’ll start seeing in your feeds (that’s why I’m posting about it now).

Shortly, I rewrote a module that inserts “In-feed controls” (sister project for Feed Friends and Feed Preprocessor) directly into new items so now in addition to “Share” button (that changed it’s appearence to Share with Feed Friends), you can see so common Add to del.icio.us, Digg it and Search on Technorati links.

Now you don’t need to depend on blog author to insert these links into posts - you can use Feed Preprocessor (which is part of Feed Friends’ feed management) to add them to all feeds you’re using.

P.S. interface to configure preprocessing is on it’s way and you’ll be able to do more preprocessing for your feeds relatively soon.

I was pretty tired past week because of this bullshit with carpeting in my apartment and a lot of information I got from Syndicate and Streaming Media East, but I spent some time on improoving friends interaction as well as feed management.

• Now you can see not only your friends but people who added as a friend and reading news you shared. You can read their news by clicking “add” button next to their name.
• Also you can invite friends who are not FeedFriends users yet - just send them invitation e-mail. Once they register, you’ll be added as friends to each others list.
• Feeds tree is much more functional now and you can add feeds to any level of the group tree as well as delete groups with feeds alltogether. All of thet is reflected accordingly in OPMLs (remember, you can import whole listof preprocessed feeds to you reader with just one URL).
• I also added rudimentary account setting editor but I will improve it later.

More to come - currently I’m working on following features:

• Interface to finally be able to place all the different controls into your feed. Backend is already there and quite promising but interface eventually will be quite flexible and will bring more meening to both FeedPreprocessor and InFeedControls subprojects. It will start to appear piece by piece so don’t expect constant miracle ;)
• Tools to share news and pages directly from the browser - without reader
• Communities and multiple output channels

Please feel free to post your comments - I’ll be happy to discuss all this (I’m still thinking about putting up a Forum but I hate empty forums - even more then empty comment lists).

Right before going to Syndicate conference, I opened Feed Friends to public.

It’s still in very raw state and several actions fail without giving user any feedback e.g.:

• Atom feeds are not supported yet
• If feed fails to pass initial import it appears untitled
• and some more

But it works for me, works form some other people and clearly worth opening - just expect it to be fixed on the go.

I’m also going to create some feedback and discussion mechanism (either forum or mail-list) in near future but for now, feel free to submit all your concerns as comments to this entry.

And I hope to see more news shared by you!

Sergey

FeedFriends toolbar left incubator and now available to all users.

Now all the links in the feed are converted on the fly to toolbar links (with same base module that absolutizes links and helps to see those images that got corrupted otherwise).

What it means is that target page is opened inside a frame and on the top of that frame there is another tiny frame (36 pixels high at the moment) that contains “share” button, feed item title and a link to the initial link (in case you’d like to get back to where you started).

This toolbar significantly saved my time when I tried to chase stories (to share them) after I clicked deeper into the story which happens quite often.

P.S. some sites (e.g. Make magazine) coded their pages in the way that it detects being opened inside a frame and jumps our of it. I’m sorry to say that this can’t be reasonably avoided and I respect site owners decision to do so. In this case you’ll have to feel the pain and get back the feed item in your reeder to share it until I find some other tricks (like popups instead of toolbar or URL posting - both were given serious thoughts for this or other reasons).

Now links in descriptions are being absolutized relative to original feed URL upon fetching. This is supposed to fix missing images and broken links which are caused by feed item being moved from original feed (preprocessed feed, then friends feed and so on).

I wrote perl class that allows changing all links in HTML code in one call (will be used for some other features as well) and a subclass that absolutizes it based on some URL.
It will be my first OpenSource Perl module that goes up on CPAN - it will be available soon at http://search.cpan.org/~sergeyche/

OPML generation is fixed so I hope you’ll get correct results.

You can regenerate OPML without changing the list of feeds by just clicking here.

If you still have bugs, please let me know by making a comment to this post including bug description and OPML feed URL.

I’m sorry to say that but all items shared so far (all 21 of them) were lost during old item deletion process testing.

Luckily only 2 of them were not mine, sorry, Dima, I hope that overall system performance will make you happy and you’ll forget those two tiny messages.

P.S. I’ll be making daily backups of the database to avoid this problem in the future.