Newsbeuter

Feeling comfortable using Newsbeuter? The console is not your world? -> click.

It's basically doing everything you're asking for: Fetching the latest articles, showing only the stuff I haven't read yet, opening it smoothly in a GUI-browser of my choice and it's quick! I mean, really quick! Initially it was OK until I took some time to read the documentation. Allowing more than one reload-thread really speeded things up. So checking of about 40 sources takes just about eight seconds.

As always the config file is slowly growing, because every once in a while you get new ideas about what might be nice to have. Or you simply become aware of your own habits and you start looking for solutions to make things easier.

There were just a few modifications I made in ~/.newsbeuter/config so far:

# Open Tabs in Browser in Background
browser "opera -backgroundpage %u"

# Automatic reload when starting
auto-reload yes
refresh-on-startup yes
reload-time 23
reload-threads 4

# Reading process display
display-article-progress yes

# History Limit
history-limit 10000

# Article save path
save-path ~/.newsbeuter/saved_articles

# Don't show feeds without updates
show-read-feeds no

Twitter

Since twitter shut down their API v1.0 in 2014 and upgraded to v1.1, the looked all RSS feeds for unauthorized access. Stupid.

This little script parses a twitter timeline and outputs an XML RSS feed.

This can be added to the ~/.newsbeuter/urls

exec:~/.newsbeuter/twitter2rss.rb <twitterhandle>

Errors

Newsbeuter already running

Description:

$ newsbeuter
Starting newsbeuter 2.5...
Loading configuration...done.
Error: an instance of newsbeuter is already running (PID: 0)

This error showed up on a newly configured system.

Solution:

Like this error here, I made an error in the setup. Though I did not configure the urls as ~/.newsbeuter instead of ~/.newsbeuter/urls, I did something else.

I had moved the cache.db file of newsbeuter into directory with remote synchronisation. The sync had not been updated yet and the cache file was not existing (including the directory where it was supposed to be). Just making sure the configuration requirements were met (I started the sync and created the required directory structure that way), fixed the problem.