Lilina News Aggregator

I have just uploaded Lilina 1.0 Alpha 1 to Google Code. This is taken from revision 100 from Subversion.

Download it now.

I added jQuery into the mix today. It should be able to replace all of the functions currently used in engine.js

As an example, expanding and collapsing items. Up until the revision 89, around 45 lines were used for working out what was clicked and changing it and the background. It took every click and checked whether it was needed. If it was, it went through complicated processes working out what to do.
With jQuery, it’s all handled for us, and the only code we need is:
$(document).ready(function() {
$(".title").click(function(){
$(this).next().next().slideToggle().parent().toggleClass("c1").toggleClass("c2");
});
});

Review: We cut down 45 lines to 3 lines! Everything is handled for us now by jQuery and is about 4 times faster. Plus, it’s ultra easy to add new features, like the removal of date headers. Thanks jQuery!

I now have the cache working. Seriously this time. It now also adds a comment to the top of the page with either Retrieved from cache or Generated fresh. This should aid in debugging.

I now have the “show only from x hours ago” buttons working again.

For anyone following the development of Lilina on SVN, I now have the feed’s source displaying properly on each item.
The installer is also almost finished.

I just tested Lilina on my laptop which had a few programs running, just to get a fairly accurate time on the loading (my computer is bogged down).

The results were amazing:

• 3.12 seconds on the first go
• 1.07 seconds on reload

These times are incredible compared to old loading times of 10 seconds for one feed.

There are some important things to note however:

• HTMLPurifier uses a lot of CPU and memory resources
  • As the author says: “Precisely why you need to cache HTMLPurifier’s output”
  • However, Lilina does not cache HTMLPurifier’s output. This must be fixed
• Lilina isn’t finished yet, so the times may be inaccurate.
• Loading times are dependant on the speed of the server’s connection:
  The faster the server, the less time needed to load

Now, once I get the OPML import up and running, I will be able to test for security flaws.

I finally have the caching system working. I accidentally had it before the settings, which screwed with it because the times weren’t set.

Kellan has released his rewritten code of Magpie.

Happy New Year to all Lilina users!

With the new year, I thought I’d give a run-down of the new features in Lilina 1.0:

• New admin panel
• Plugin & Templating system
• Faster loading times
• Support for enclosures and podcasts
• Abilty to rename feeds
• Configuration via a web-interface
• Default configuration kept in inc/core/conf.php
• User settings kept in settings.php
• RSS and Atom output
• Caching of the front page
• XHTML Output
• Sanitizing feeds - No platypuses turning up in the middle of your pages
• Proper OPML importing: Doesn’t overwrite your current feeds
• Database support (Note: not full support, but support)

Plus more

Welcome to the new and improved Lilina web-site. This takes over from the old site at SourceForge.

On this site, we will host support pages for folks who need some help and development pages for those folks who just want to help.

On the technical side, this site is powered by Wordpress and the forums by Vanilla. The style is a custom made one and is integrated with the forums.

I will be using the bug tracker at Google Code and I will be hosting the downloads at Google Code and SourceForge.

1.0-prealpha will be released within a week or so in a semi-usable way. More information on 1.0 coming soon.

Anyway, in the mean time, browse around the site and check out the pages. More are added every day!