Website
Feed Notifier is a large enough project that I maintain a separate website for it. Go there to download the app or learn more about it…
About
Feed Notifier is a Windows application that resides in the system tray and displays pop-up notifications on your desktop when new items arrive in your subscribed RSS or Atom feeds. By default, the pop-ups look like this…
Feed Notifier is my most successful personal project, with thousands of active users.
Main Features
- Supports all common RSS and Atom web feed protocols.
- Clean look and feel with user selectable themes.
- Configurable polling interval for each feed.
- Configurable popup duration.
- Configurable popup size and position.
- Configurable popup transparency.
- Popups do not steal keyboard or mouse focus from other applications.
- Popups show item age and author.
- Navigation controls in popups to view next/previous items.
- Advanced keyword filtering options.
- Supports launching from Firefox and other browsers via feed:// protocol.
- Supports enabling/disabling individual feeds.
- Deactivates when user is idle to save bandwidth and processing time.
- Supports authenticated feeds that require a username and password.
- Supports using a proxy server.
- Displays favicon for feeds when available.
- Multi-threaded feed polling.
dosn’t work on XP Pro.
[notifier.exe.log]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “main.py”, line 1, in
File “zipextimporter.pyo”, line 82, in load_module
File “wx\__init__.pyo”, line 45, in
File “zipextimporter.pyo”, line 82, in load_module
File “wx\_core.pyo”, line 4, in
File “zipextimporter.pyo”, line 98, in load_module
ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading wx\_core_.pyd
Thank you for reporting this bug.
It appears that I failed to include a DLL that some users already have on their system and others do not. I’ve included the DLL that I believe was needed and have re-built and uploaded a new installer. Please let me know if this resolves the issue, thanks!
My 2 cents: Downloaded and tested on Windows XP Professional today and it works fine for me (not sure if I would have had the effected DLL file). Thanks for the great little application… it is simple and clean with no ads and no requirements on .NET or Java. I really like how it pulls URLs from the clipboard when adding new feeds.
Feature Request #1: I would love it if I could left click on the icon and be presented with a window that allows me to look through previous entries in my feeds and possibly search text in them.
Feature Request #2: An option to “Update All Feeds Now” in the context menu when I right click on the systray icon.
Thanks for the feedback! Request #2 is a good idea and easy to implement. I will add it soon. #1 is sort of already implemented; if you left-click the icon it will re-popup past “history” items, in order. (Keep clicking and you’ll go further back in the history.) But this could be implemented in a better way and there is no searching built in yet. I will think about the best way to add these features. Thanks again.
P.S. I think my app crashes if it’s running when you logout or shutdown the machine. I’m looking into this one as well, but I think it’s a bug in the UI library I’m using.
Yep, mine crashes on shutdown too, stops shutdown and waits until you click end task.
Is there any chance of obtaining the source code?
I’m trying to create a system tray “notifier” app for a youth club and I’d like to be able to disable the “manage feeds” option for example.
Well done so far, good project! :)
James
Hi
I wish it would have a option to scroll the full title or have it wrap multiple lines.. often the front of the new post is not important.. e,g, alt.binaries.blah blah. filename details.. etc etc..
also option perhaps resizing the notifier window.. so can make bigger or show more items vertically
also an about box would make sense.. so can link to website and forum here
ta
A way also to remind for each feed not just the last popped up message.
sorry just noticed can click the rss icon each time will show last reminder from each feed.. so needs a quick help file readme link from it for hidden features then :)
but still playing with it.
needs a small icon in the popup message that shows the full feed in a window as well.. as some feeds if click the item only shows that item and cant see all the times of the feed if want to read them all
also a feature to have a message stay on screen until click a cross X would be good if away from pc and missed it if scrolls of the screen..
and some manage feeds opens to re-edit the feed or time and a tick box to disable a certain feed without deleting..
then the tool would be the best thing since slice bread
Cheers
Great suggestions. Thank you!
started to get a error about png missing
cant load file images/rss-small.png file does not exist
unless nod32 or something blocking it or deleted it automattically.. better check the install folder incase
hmm looks like maybe nortons 360 has indeed deleted the pngs for some reason.. nothing quarantined so auto-deleted not sure.. maybe the graphics need to be a dll to get around stupid falses detections from scanners too
It would be nice if there was some way to tell the notifier to “catch up”.
We’re using your (very much needed) application to Monitor our Continuous Integration process (Hudson). Over the weekend it seems (I say seems because I can’t completely figure out what’s going on) like Hudson added a bunch of entries to the RSS feed and it’s taking the notifier a great deal of time to display each. I’d love to be able to say, “Notifier, take all of the ‘new’ feed entries you see and put them in the read section”, that way it’ll only show me new stuff from that point on.
Does that make sense?
Thanks,
Leo
Definitely. I want this feature too. Sometimes after being away for a long time I get a flood of popups that take forever to go away even if I rapidly click on them.
In the meantime, you can just restart the app. On startup, it will only display one popup per feed.
Michael,
Thanks for your reply. I’m having another problem with the app that I hope you can help me resolve. As I mentioned in my last post, we’re trying to use Feed Notifier to monitor Hudson and we’re running into some trouble:
The first time the notifier polls our RSS feed, it correctly pulls in the latest entry. On the next poll, however, it seems to be pulling in a bunch of older entries. I click to clear these out, but at the next poll the same entries return.
At first I expected that this was a problem with the RSS feed itself and contacted the Hudson developer. You can see our back and forth discussion here:
http://www.nabble.com/RSS-Monitoring-Confusion-td21954187.html
After reviewing my sample RSS feed files, he seems to think that the problem might lie with the Feed Notifier application. Not being an RSS expert myself, I’m not sure what the problem is.
I’ve found a public Hudson RSS instance you can test against:
http://hudson.zones.apache.org/hudson/view/Ant/rssAll
Unfortunately I cannot test it myself as I am behind a company firewall and don’t see any way of making Feed Notifier proxy server aware (if there is, let me know and I’ll perform further troubleshooting).
Alternately, you could reference the two uploaded feed files mentioned in the above discussion thread.
Thanks so much for your time! Feed Notifier fills a significant need of ours and I look forward to integrating into our toolkit.
-Leo
My first thought was the IDs or timestamps in the feeds were changing but it looks like the problem may be because there are over 100 items returned by the feed. The app currently caches only the last 100 items. Is there a feed that will return a smaller number for you? Otherwise I can release a new build with an increase in this value. (Eventually it will/should be user-configurable.)
I went ahead and added an options dialog to the notifier, which includes a setting for how many items to keep in the cache. Download the latest installer (same download link) and try it out.
The only other feed available would be something that looks like this:
http://hudson.zones.apache.org/hudson/view/Ant/rssLatest
It returns only the latest builds. That said, Feed Notifier doesn’t seem to recognize the entries in this feed at all. It never shows a pop-up display.
I’ll download the latest executable and give it a try. In the meantime, I have a query in with the Hudson developer to find out if there’s a way to customize the feed size:
http://www.nabble.com/RSS-Monitoring-Confusion-td21954187.html
Thanks again!
Those URL’s are working for me from here…
Sorry for the dual post there.
Setting the cache to 200 seems to have fixed the problem with the rssAll feed. So thanks for that!
I’m not sure what the problem is with the rssLatest feed then…over here it pulls in the latest entries correctly the first poll, but all future polls don’t discover new items, even though I can see them in the feed.
The first part probably is enough to get me by though, so thanks again! I’ll let you know if the status changes in the future.
Wow, great application! Impressed.
Maybe an extra suggestion:
A counter to count the total (new) messages found. For example you could display the counter with a mouseover on the system tray icon.
Looking forward to see the update.
The Feed Notifier application has just been updated with a new “Dismiss All” feature and a fix to the shutdown crash bug. Download it now!
Hi,
Not sure what happenned to my last post here.
Love the Feed Notifier – and will be using it in a project shortly – many thanks.
Would it be possible to add a ‘run at start-up’ option to enable the app to be launched everytime windows starts?
Thanks for the effort.
Rich
In the meantime, you can always copy the Feed Notifier shortcut in the start menu to your Startup folder, which is also in the start menu.
Thanks – that’s exactly what I have done.
Keep up the good work!!!
Would you consider adding a stack feature, like the unfortunately discontinued Alertbear has? Maybe a hotkey to bring up the popup(s) also.
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Hi, good work this tiny app.
One thing though that annoyes me: the 60 minutes upper limit on “Polling Interval” in the “Add feed” dialog. I have feeds that I know for sure they are updated once a day. I need to be able to enter 1440 minutes (24×60).
I can’t think of any reason why you imposed this limit :( The timer API has no problem firing at one day interval.
Thanks for the this quality work.
Opps, here is an ugly one. “The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed.”
Link: http://www.ghelir.ro/rss
My guess is that the URL is valid, because it works in IE7.
Hi.
I am trying to get your wonderful tool working with a RSS feed we get from our Windows Sharepoint Services Site, but it only says “The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed.”
I dont know if it is because of the stupid URLs the Sharepoint insists on using, example:
http://example.intranet.com/wss/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=%7B78D36DA6%2D3218%2D4915%2DA42A%2DE0E960679A3E%7D
Anyone got any ideas, I would love to get this application running, it is just what I have been looking for!
Thanks in advance
Mattias
hmmm, as usual, even though i spent a couple of hours searching the internet for solutions I found one lead right after posting this.
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=29580402&threadid=29580402
seems like it might be a WSS issue, hardly surprising :(
I am so sick and tired of Microsofts behaviour…
If you can find a publicly accessible sample Sharepoint RSS feed, I can look into it.
Thank you for taking the time :)
I think I found one public sharepoint site:
https://usmc-sharepoint.securespsites.com/Lists/Public%20SharePoint%20Examples/AllItems.aspx
If you click “Actions”->”View RSS feed” you should be able to see how it looks for me as well on our internal network.
Best regards,
Mattias
Hi I’m a network admin at a SMB company and we have installed FeedReader http://www.feedreader.com a lightweight RSS Client on all computers in the company with predefined RSS channels. Our Intranet is WSS 3.0 and RSS feeds are working as they should. Now when trying RSS Notifyer with the same feeds I’m getting the same error message as Mattias “The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed.” I’m aware that MS has not followed standards when they implemented RSS feeds into Sharepoint, but the fact that RSS feeds are working on a lot of other RSS clients leads me to think that the problem has to do with authentication rather than MS not following standards.
If your feeds are password, protected, you can try entering the user/password in the URL as described at the top of this page:
http://www.feedparser.org/docs/http-authentication.html
I know it sucks to have those shown in plain text, but it’s the only support for authenticated feeds as of yet.
Sorry but including username and password in the url did not help (also tried “domain\user” format aswell)
can you please allow polling intervals less than 5?
I did try the DOMAIN\user format as well and it did not work for me either, could it have something to do with the ‘\’?
I tried enclosing it in single quotes and double quotes as well, but that did not help.
We’re trying to add a Drupal-rss feed – we get: The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed. I tried with different feeds but I can’t seem to add any of them. These do not require authentication.
Is there a way to start the app in debugmode?
I’d really like to give this tool a try…
Some requests:
1)Show the favicon of the website insted of the orange RSS feed icon.
2)Show complete title(atleast on mouse hover).Some long titles are cut down on display.
3)Show the feed published time(like 10min ago,1 hour ago,50 secs ago)
4)Some notification/popup styles
Thanks for your software..
thanks to Administration.. IM In
Love it! Thanks
Great stuff. Items I would like:
Polling at 30s intervals.
Pop-up setting for center of page
A “Forever” setting for Pop-up Duration
I have no problem with authenticated feeds using the http://user:pass@domain/ form. Be sure to escape special characters in the feed URL (e.g. spaces as %20).
THANK YOU SO MUCH! This is perfect for my needs.
One tidbit: the little icons aren’t showing on the right-click menu. It all works OK though!
Need proxy settings!!!
please it would be perfect if i ‘could’ know for a fact that im not missing older messages if i haven’t been to my comp for a day or 2
Simple applications are the best solutions.
This is one of these!! Thank You
Contact me if you need a mirror for download or anything.
Thanks Michael for sharing this very nice tool with the world. :)
Btw, just a small suggestion, is it possible to allow users to customize the “pop-up duration” to 0 or “Never auto close” such that the pop-up will never go away automatically but will wait for manual user intervention to dismiss it?
I’m using your tool to monitor important system alerts that must be acted upon, and thus, don’t want to miss any.
Once again, thanks for the clean and neat tool! :)
Could you set the minimum polling time to 1 min?
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Hi, I was looking for a application like these to notify my coworkers about the news in our corporate blog. Congratulations for the great work. The app worked like a charm form me, but not for my coworkers as they aren’t administrators of their machines (I’m). Is there any know limitation of Feed Notifier with non admin users? I tryed to give full control to them in the Fedd Notifier folder without success (the app still don’t allow to add feeds and don’t notifier the ones added by the admin of the machine (me)). Thank you.
hi just wonder ..could you add an Export feeds settings for possible backup
Hi!
Great product. We have been looking for this kind of application in a long time.
Some future requests:
* Set the Entry Cache to 0 (or 1), so you can use the application to display imortant messages from only one RSS feed.
* Set the Polling Interval down to 1 minute.
Thanks for a great product.
Hi,
Great app, this is what I was looking for.
Could we have a way to export/save our feed definitions so we don’t have to re-create them when reinstalling ?
Could you please explain Polling Idle Timeout ?
Thanks a lot,
Alfred
Hi There,
Is there a solution yet for the:
“The URL entered does not appear to be a valid RSS/Atom feed.”
problem?
Nice app!
Thanks,
Kristijan
How can it be configured to use IE proxy settings, or manual settings?
Version 2.0 now has proxy support. Get it here… http://www.feed-notifier.com/
Hi,
nice tool, realy……
But on Windows 7 64 bit it looses all feeds.
Windows was fresh installed.
Then suddenly all feeds are gone …..
Happens to often.
Then i must put all feeds again.
Can you fix it ?
Best
Walter