Developments With CMLRSSReader

The CMLRSSReader software I discussed earlier has had several important developments. Most importantly, it now tracks new and modified items as feeds are updated. New/updated items and feeds are considered "unread" and displayed, at the top of the item list, in bold, while old, "read" items are in plain text. Menu selections allow both items and entire feeds to be marked as either read or unread.


Also, I am now storing processed feeds by Java serialization. This has two advantages. First, feeds can now be loaded faster than by re-parsing the entire feed file itself. More importantly, all information about the feed can be stored this way, including, for example, which items have been marked read This has allowed me to add another program "hook" to the configuration, the <PostProcess> hook. Post-process programs can read the serialized feed (although they must be written in Java to do so).

A working example of what can be done with this new feature can be found
here, which lists all new/modified items in the usefulchem-molecules RSS feed. Remember that this feed is regenerated every time the usefulchem-molecules blog is updated, so this page will always reflect the most recent changes to this blog.

For more details on this, and work to date in UsefulChem automation, see my summary at the UsefulChem Wiki (cheminfo).