Azureus RSSTray
Well I guess since weatstraw went MIA???? where are you? I will have to post something.
I have been wanting to find a way to manage my torrents in a more savvy way lately. I have aproximatly 15 shows that I watch and always want to start my downloads as soon as a new torrent has been posted.
One of my previous methods to manage the torrent files was to use a rss aggregator, apply filters to the feeds I subscribe to and then periodically check up on the aggregator to see what it has found. If anyone else is doing something similar you know how tedious and unreliable this can be.
My other method was to use a rss plugin for Azureus and tell it wild card filters to match the shows that I want it to snag. It seems like no matter how good your regex expressions are, you will always get duplicate torrents or if your expressions are too tight, you will miss some torrents that you may really want.
So I was sick over a weekend and really had a bug to write some code and to solve my little dilema; one sick weekend later I had Azureus RSSTray. The main idea is that you subscribe to your rss feeds and as new torrents are discovered through polling, you are notified by a little tray icon. Once you have a torrent discovered, you can choose to post the torrent to your azureus server which will que the torrent for download. Alternatively you can choose to remove the torrent from your list and never see that torrent again.
RSSTray is not by any means complete, but it is at a fairly stable state. I have started a sourceforge site for it (mostly for the free SVN account) and a public site. All in all I am pretty pleased with what I did in a short amount of time and mostly I just like to see notifications of new torrents while I am at work.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
holy poop!
I did not realize that YOU actually wrote that. I figured you were kidding to be honest. This thing IS the answer to all of our aggregation woes that have been our collective torrent growing pains.
I can’t wait to get home and take a deeper look at this now that I know YOU ACTUALLY WROTE IT and that its not just another internet project to take a look at. KUDOS!
also, to mr wheatstraw…. do you happen to have any of the content from your early wiki banging around anymore? I’m looking specifically on the ideas that had been collected for a ‘digital life’ store. Drop me a line, message me up, or ring a ding my ding a ling.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Very very cool! I’ll be posting a follow-up to with some more comments about this soon! That’s some darn good work for a few days of being sick!
November 29th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
oh yeah, one usability issue though is that the window continually minimizes itself. not a bad idea except that I have 429 torrents to sift through before this is something I can use. =)
I also see that you have a bunch of feeds pre-configured and your login information as well. My guess is you’ve changed it since then, but having your no-ip address listed may end up being trouble.
November 30th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Yeah I suppose i had better remove all my personal info from there. In my hurry to get the sourceforge page up I forgot to clean up the config file. I am making some significant usability changes that I will post soon, such as some better error handling, support for SSL, and removing the auto collapse timout on window activation. I’ll keep you guy’s posted.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:10 am
So I spent some time hacking on this last night (until the power went out and I was literally left in the dark).
Here are my thoughts:
To begin with, I don’t use a windows machine much so the “tray” part of this app is useless to me. However, if I could expose the core functionality as a web service and consume with whatever client I want (a web browser, Mac OS X widget, ffox extension or greasemonkey script, gnome applet) it becomes very useful.
I started hacking away at the web service using Dream .NET-REST SDK (http://doc.opengarden.org/). I’ve used it a little at work and it’s super slick.
I’ve defined the following “features” and implemented a few of them:
* GET:feeds/ — returns a list of feeds
* POST:feeds/add — adds a feed
* POST:feeds/delete — deletes a feed
* GET:torrents/ — returns a list of torrents
* GET: config/ — returns the configuration.xml file
* POST: config/update/ — not implemented, will set/create config settings
* POST:azureus/post/ — not implemented, will tell Azureus to start the torrent
Changes/TODO:
* I had to move a few files out of the main RSSTray project so I could access them from my service
* I’d like to decouple the logging from using Windows.Forms. I’d rather use log4net
* need to implement caching like the WinForms client does so each GET:torrents/ doesn’t ping/parse every feed
* need to maintain history like WinForms client does
* add a “userid” parameter to all the calls so multiple users/configs can be supported
Nice work again Bader. This is really cool! Hopefully I can hack away some more this weekend! BTW, happy birthday tomorrow (I think)
November 30th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
SSL and user, pass is now supported in the SVN version. I will upload a set of binaries tomorrow.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:00 am
Post something about this at OpenGarden.org too. And Happy Birthday and Congrats to the other dude on the wedding.