Fixing my Akregator morning routine

written on Wednesday, July 10, 2013

When I wake up, I often start the day with a few webcomics (yes, I am a slacker) which I read with Akregator. One of them is Penny Arcade. This site also features articles, mostly about the game industry. One morning I bumped into an article about the OUYA, an Android-based console. Unfortunately, the link from Akregator did not work. This was not the first time it has happened so I decided to look into it.

Downloading the RSS feed, it turned out some articles do not have a complete URL, instead, the <link> item contains only an absolute path. The RSS spec says the <link> is an URL, so the feed is not spec-compliant, but that is probably to be expected when the feed announces itself like this :)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    <title>Penny Arcade</title>
    <link>http://www.penny-arcade.com</link>
    <description>News Fucker 6000</description>
    ...

Anyway, I made a small patch to add support for that spec deviation. Happy with my fix, I went bug-hunting on Bugzilla, wondering if someone had reported it before. I stumbled on bug 117478, which looked similar, but was actually about an ATOM feed. I thought the fix would be similar and dived into it. Turns out this new fix had nothing to do with the previous one... (by the way, the feed from the bug is quite interesting, I added it to my feed list)

Having fixed two Akregator bugs, I decided this would be an Akregator day, and went to look into another one which had been annoying me for too long, bug 103216: "Icons created by embedded browser remain in status bar". This one took me quite some time to figure out. I tried multiple approaches before setting on one which also required a small change in kdelibs. But it's fixed now, Akregator feels a bit nicer to use!

PS: