Crocodile Reader Project Started

My first C# open source project has been officially started. The project is named Crocodile and was created to read my feeds while on the tube (If you live in London like me or any other city with underground trains you know the pain). I belive that the whole RSS/Atom idea is great and allows me to gather everything, what I want to read on the net, in one place, but some things were annoying me and that’s why I come up with the Crocodile. First of all I couldn’t find any feed reader to download the feeds for me in a way I want them to be downloaded (more on that in a sec), secondly my favourite feed from DZone includes the link not to the web page I want to actually read but to DZone web page with small description (same as in the feed) and a thumbnail/link to the original, submitted web page. Dzone (www.dzone.com) feeds annoyed me so much that this was one of the main reasons I have started the whole Crocodile idea. So what the Crocodile is? Its very simple and small app using browser component found in .Net to see the pages associaged with the feed. The idea is to download the whole pages together with css, js etc and save them for offline browsing. So far the project is still in alpha but it works to the degree making the app usable. Nothing special in that so far but the best idea is the feature called ‘Cleaners’ and ‘Filters’. Cleaners (works so far only for DZone and is completly hardcoded) convert the link found in the feed to the original page submitted to dzone website – if you use DZone you know what I mean) and displays the original web sites instead of full of adverts DZone pages. Second idea called ‘Filters’ not implemented yet at all, would parse all feed items descriptions and display only the feeds filtered with keywords previously entered by the user.
For anyone interested please visit the project web site: http://crocodile.sourceforge.net.

Short tutorial for all offline DZone fans:

1. Install the Crocodile app found at http://crocodile.sourceforge.net
2. Run .msi installer and keep pressing next (nothing special here)
3. When you run Crocodile, click on the small cross green button to add new subscription
4. Enter ‘dzone’ in the subscription name and ‘http://feeds.dzone.com/dzone/frontpage?format=xml’ as the url address
5. Confirm by clicking ‘Ok’
6. In your subscriptions panel click ‘dzone’ and wait for your feed items to be populated.
7. Clicking on each item would display the page associated with the feed item
8. Click orange up arrow button to ‘Clean’. This will convert all links found in the feed to links pointing to original web sites submitted to Dzone
9. Now you are ready to browse the original pages submitted to Dzone by clicking on each feed item found in the list.
10. You can download the pages for offline browsing (pages are saved as .mht archives).
11. Minimizing Crocodile puts it in the system tray where it updates the feeds periodically.

Full applicaton screenshot is available from sourceforge.

Please be aware that this software has just been born and is quite messy (sometimes crashes, sometimes behaves strangely) I just wanted to share the dzone feature as quickly as I have made it and it works for me. If you want to share your time on Crocodile development please contact me either through this blog or sourcefoge web site any help would be appreciated. The Crocodile sources are available from svn repo.