Rolling with Raindrop

Today Mozilla announced a message aggregation project they've been working on called Raindrop. Now, I find myself slower and slower to fall into the hype on these type of things, but after downloading the source and getting it up and running on my machine, I have to say it looks pretty cool.

The install took a couple of hours, mostly due to my non-existent python chops and having to download and install Mercurial. But after a while I was up and running and pulling down my twitter feeds and emails into the same location. Way cool.

Spelunking

But what kind of nerd would I be if I just got it running and stopped at that? ;)

In addition with directions on how to setup twitter and gmail aggregation, the default install comes with a single RSS feed baked in. But who can do with just one RSS feed right? So I set out to add another.

It proved pretty difficult just to find where the initial feed was set (Textmate Ack in Project failed me) so I hopped into the Raindrop chat room where Mark Hammond from the Raindrop team pointed me to the correct directory. (Mark also said he didn't know if anyone had even tried this yet, but I wasn't going to let that little detail stop me.)

With his help I soon had 2 RSS feeds dumping into my Raindrop. Cool. Sure they were being dumped into a single box that had the wrong heading, but it was a start.

The major thing that bugged me was that they are streaming in without links. Boooo. Feeds need links. So I start hacking at the JS and HTML implementation of those messages and before long I had an external link for each headline.

Missing the Point

I felt pretty accomplished, but I sat back and realized that I had missed the boat on the whole point of Raindrop. It's not just to aggregate data and then push you off to the outside world, from what I understand it's about being able to interact with all types of content from a single location. The external links had to go.

A quick look at the twitter implementation revealed what I needed, a link to couchdb doc that actually holds each story. The Raindrop UI is setup to handle the display of these so after digging in and finding out where to get the document id I was in business. I could view entries from multiple feeds, open them within the Raindrop application, and even archive them. (I have no idea where they go when they are archived, I just know they leave the front page.)

So all that work for this little diff:

diff -r e07f7793ad1b client/lib/rdw/story/templates/GenericGroupMessage.html
--- a/client/lib/rdw/story/templates/GenericGroupMessage.html  Fri Oct 23 15:10:01 2009 +1100
+++ b/client/lib/rdw/story/templates/GenericGroupMessage.html  Sat Oct 24 02:23:34 2009 -0500
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
   </div>
   <div class="message">
     <div class="content">
-      <span class="subject">${subject}</span>
+      <span class="subject">${subject} <a href="#${expandLink}" class="expand" title="${i18n.expand}">${i18n.expand}</a></span>
     </div>
   </div>
 </div>

It doesn't seem like much, but it represents several hours of education and paradigm examination and I'm proud of it.

Now, off to bed...