Welcome to parabola

parabola is a browser based news feed aggregator. It is written using Ruby on Rails and uses the quite excellent FeedTools module for all the parsing of feeds.

Screenshots

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NOTE: Due to the damn spam bots anonymous write access is off. You can log in as guest/machine to add/modify tickets. Feel free to mail me at martin@… for support.

Documentation

Requirements

  • Ruby 1.8.4
  • Rails 1.1+
  • MySQL 4.1+
  • Rubygems
  • FeedTools? 0.2.25+
  • acts_as_taggable 2.0.1+

Installation

Database

Create a MySQL database called 'parabola_p'. Add a user with proper access to it: 

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE parabola_p;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON parabola_p.* TO parabola@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'parabola';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

NOTE: If you use a different username than 'parabola' and/or a different password than 'parabola' you should subsequently edit 'config/database.yml' to reflect that.

Now initialize the database with the schema. Stand in the root directory of the parabola src and do: 

$ export RAILS_ENV=production
$ rake db:schema:load

This loads the 'db/schema.rb' AND DELETES ALL CONTENT into whatever you have defined as the production database in your 'config/database.yml'.

Now test by running the built-in webserver: 

$ ./script/server -e production

If you can connect to http://localhost:3000/ and see a login form you are up and running.

Upgrading

If you're upgrading from a previous installation you need to migrate any database changes. Simply stand in the root directory of the parabola src and do: 

$ export RAILS_ENV=production
$ rake db:migrate

It should finish without errors.

Remember to backup your database first in case of problems!

Updating Feeds

The following assume you've installed parabola in the path '/var/www/parabola'.

You should add the following line to be run in your scheduler/cron: 

/var/www/parabola/script/runner -e production 'Feed.update_all_feeds'

You can of course run this manually from the command line as you wish. To force updating of feeds simply specify ':force=true': 

/var/www/parabola/script/runner -e production 'Feed.update_all_feeds(:force => true)'

Make sure the entire 'public/cache/' is writable by the user which the script runs as. Below this directory favicons are stored.

When updating feeds (or to be exact right after) articles are deleted as according to your keep number and keep days settings.

Using

If you use the special tag ':nfp:' on a feed its articles will not appear on the frontpage.

There are three types of ways to view the articles in parabola.

1. Frontpage sorted by feed

In your settings the option 'List articles by feed' obviously means just that if it is ticked. Articles are shown first by feed and then sorted by date. I.e. if you have two feeds called 'Boing Boing' and 'Slashdot' the articles for 'Boing Boing' will be listed first, then the Slashdot articles.

2. Frontpage sorted by date

To enable this the option 'List articles by feed' must be off. Articles are then sorted by date and time regardless of which feed they belong to. This is the most popular way of viewing.

To visit an article you click the title. To view the stored body of the article you click the down arrow just to the left of it.

3. The 'Articles' view.

In the navigation area the 'Articles' view is a bit special as it will list articles with bodies shown. This is quite handy to get a quick look down a bunch of articles.

Download

Releases

Version 0.5 - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released 26th of October 2006.

Older Releases

Latest Source

Upgrading from pre-0.6 requires pinpoint precission. Please read the README'''

You can checkout the latest version (trunk) from the Subversion repository. It is usually quite stable. 

svn checkout svn://lotus.aeonblue.dk/parabola/trunk parabola

From then on you can update your checkout by doing: 

cd parabola
svn update

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