Google Reader Alternatives for Rainmeter

[jsmorley]

With Google Reader heading into the abyss on July 1, 2013, those folks who are using the approach of getting RSS/Atom feeds from Google Reader are going to need to find alternative methods.

There are currently two alternatives that have been created by members of the Rainmeter community:

Reader from Kaelri. This uses Lua to create a very robust generic RSS/Atom feed. See the example .rmskin at the bottom of the post for an example.

UniNews from moshi. A powerful solution that does not use Lua (and thus is probably a better alternative for feeds not in English / Latin Character set).

One of these approaches should be considered if you have a skin that can access multiple different feeds, as both provide a "generic" ability to parse most RSS/Atom feeds. If you have a skin that is just used for one feed site, It is not difficult to parse any given RSS/Atom feed with WebParser and create your own skin.

There is also a site that will mix together a list of RSS/Atom feeds into one, which you can then parse. http://www.rssmix.com/ Be aware that there is no way to identify which item came from which source, as they are all mixed into one generic feed, and that I am not sure what if any delay there might be from the original sources.

[GJ51]

Thanks for the tip. When google pulled the plug it forced me to look for a replacement for the readers that I had that died.

I downloaded and started working on Evereader and like it very much. For the most part I've been able to master most of it, including adding:

[MeasureExecuteUpdate]
Measure=Calc
Formula=Counter % 120
IfAboveAction=!CommandMeasure "MeasureReader" "ShowNext()"
IfAboveValue=0

[MeasureExecuteUpdate2]
Measure=Calc
Formula=Counter % 120
IfAboveAction=!CommandMeasure "List2_MeasureReader" "ShowNext()"
IfAboveValue=0

which enables automated steping through the 3 feeds in each section - a very nice addition indeed.

The one hurdle I haven't solved is the title link which uses the FeedTitle and FeedLink variables to produce a link for the title that usually takes you to the site's rss page. I'd really like to be able to modify this so that the link can be edited to go to the parent site homepage instead of the feed link.

Some site titles will go to the site homepage, but others, especially forums will take you to the feed page.

e.g. http://rainmeter.net/forum/feed.php

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.