Orbital-Feed-Reader by mattkatz

Why?

I think that you should reduce the distance between reading and writing. Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter have all proven the importance of being able to re-share easily the things you love. Wordpress has a nice "Blog This" bookmarklet but it is just another step to take.

Instead, I'd like to bring a feed reader into Wordpress that lets you blog from your blogroll.

I'm not the only person who thinks so!

Features

• Subscribe to sites via RSS or Atom
• Auto-magically figure out feeds on a website
• Blog directly from feeds
• OPML Import/Export
• Mark feeds as Private
• Handy keyboard shortcuts
• Tag/Categorize feeds
• Mobile view

Tagging

You can now organize your feeds with tags. Instead of hunting through a big list of feeds, use tags to bundle them up into useful views.

Adding a tag to a feed so you can organize them should be easy as pie!

Responsive Mobile Design

Orbital looks great on a big desktop, but you can shrink it down to phone size and it still works

Goals

• Create a blogroll dynamically from your feeds.
• Let you share your OPML dynamically.
• Integrate into Firefox as a feed handler.

That's a lot of work to do. I'm going to take a stab at it, but I'd love your help. Let's make wordpress even better.

Right now I've got a list of feeds and selecting a feed brings up entries in that feed.

Install

In your wordpress Admin Screen:

1. Click Plugins
2. Click Add New
3. Search the Codex for "Orbital". You should see a link for the Orbital Feed Reader page.
4. Install Plugin
5. Activate Plugin

If you want the very latest code, ssh into your plugins directory and clone the project with Git by running:

$ git clone git://github.com/mattkatz/Orbital-Feed-Reader

Praise

Thanks for a great rss reader within wordpress. I read about 100 feeds every day, with about 1000 entries on average. Then for a dozen or so, I often write related blog posts. Your reader makes this much easier. Great work !

Stefan at InsightKnowledge

But the main reason to use Orbital Feed Reader is that it brings something of the power of Tumblr’s reblogging workflow to WordPress. Because it brings all the content you’re following with RSS feeds in the dashboard, the content is right where you are going to be writing, and Orbital includes a number of features that make it easy to take a chunk of text from an article in your RSS selection and use it as the foundation for a new article.

Aric at Nexcess

How To Contribute

Contributing is easy!

1. Go to GitHub and fork the Orbital Feed Reader project.
2. Make sure you've installed Ruby and RubyGems
3. We use Ditz for issue tracking so

   gem install ditz

   If you don't like Ditz, that's fine - GitHub issues work too.
4. Work on your issue or feature, then submit a pull request!

Bugtracker

Let's keep it decentralized! I'm using Ditz to track bugs. You can always use the github issue tracker, but check out what ditz gives you.

Alternatives

Hey, not everyone will want to use Orbital. Here are some excellent open source alternatives you might try.

• Tiny Tiny RSS is self-hosted, really good, and is what I used before I wrote Orbital Feed Reader. Has the ability to pseudo-blog an RSS feed of notes on items.
• NewsBlur is amazingly good looking. Open source, single developer company, has great a featureset.

I know there are others - Gregarius, Lilina, and I think The Old Reader is closed source but supposed to be a great clone of the old Google Reader.

Authors

Matt Katz

Contact

MattKatz on identi.ca or the tweeter or at morelightmorelight.com