Navigation

In #lugradio, mrben said “if it requires saving a script in a file, do it in python” in response to some talk about Bash scripting. It’s a nice thought, but as much as I like Python I think Bash has its place. I responded with:

Bash is glue, Python is polyfiller. One sticks things together. One fills holes.

I may be biased, but I like it. Of course, it’s not true all of the time, so I wouldn’t go quoting it as the rule of scripting or anything like that.

I satisfied a niggle yesterday. It took only a teeny amount of effort too.

When browsing with Epiphany and discovering a feed that I thought I might be interested in, with the help of the News Feed Subscription extension I could easily add the feed to Liferea’s subscriptions. That would be fine if I still used Liferea to read news feeds; I now use Newsbeuter.

Newsbeuter simply uses a file containing a URI at the start of each line, so it’s really easy to add new feeds. The thing took two attempts and can be found as Newsbeuter D-Bus on Miscbits. Two attempts because I scratched my head for some minutes wondering why I could update my feed list with dbus-send but Epiphany wasn’t playing. The D-Bus interface documented in the Developer Guide on GNOME Live! was org.gnome.rss.FeedReader, which has apparently since changed to org.gnome.feed.Reader. I updated the wiki page, changed a few lines in my script, and yay, I can add feeds to Newsbeuter’s feed list from Epiphany.

While I was at it, I updated the Miscbits project wiki a bit:

• Scrapped the News section. I’ll probably set up a new feed that doesn’t appear in my main feed on my site instead.

• Added a catch‐all license for Misbits stuff. Basically, that what is not already licensed differently is licensed under the terms of GPLv3.

• Updated the permissions blurbs for existing Miscbits projects to allow distribution under the terms of GPLv3. Updates to the actual project files in the repository will follow at some point. For substantial changes I’m considering changing licenses to GPLv3 only.

A feature of Firefox that I missed in Epiphany was the ability to save the currently open tabs in a bookmarks folder. My browsing habits involve opening lots of pages at once for a particular task, be it general news reading, or documentation for something I’m working on. If I decided to have a break from that task, in Firefox I would bookmark all of the open tabs so I could go back to them later. Epiphany doesn’t currently have that feature.

Epiphany does have the ability to restore a session after a crash. The session data is saved to an XML file in ~/.gnome2/epiphany/session_crashed.xml, and on the next startup Epiphany asks whether to restore the session. There is also a command‐line option to load a session from a file in the same format. An extension for Epiphany, the Tab Session Management extension, adds menu options for saving the session in the current browser window. That would have been perfect, except my browsing habits are slightly different when I use Epiphany, and especially when I’m also using the Wmii window manager: I still open lots of pages, but I use more windows instead of tabs.

Epiphany Session Manager adds the ability to save the whole session, that is every tab in every window, to a file for restoring later, either with the --load-session option to Epiphany, or using a menu item from within the browser. I’ve put a Miscbits project page up for it at:

• http://projects.bleah.co.uk/misc/wiki/EpiphanySessionManager

Update: I have since found the SessionSaver extension, which appears to save the session on quitting (or closing the last window). I think this would also cover my usage. A few places to look for third party extensions are:

• http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/ThirdPartyExtensions
• http://www.sstuhr.dk/epiphany-extensions/
• http://mike.depalatis.net/epiphany/extensions.html