Chapter 42

One of the perks of being a software architect is that in your spare time you can build neat applications to suit your own particular needs and tastes. A recent example is that I grew tired of checking the same dozen+ web sites every day (even more than once a day) to get a snapshot of what’s going on in the world and within the communities of interest to me. This was a laborious process.

Of course, all those sites exported RSS, and so I tried adding them to my mail application. I found that I *really* intensely did not like the mailbox approach to RSS. This is why Google’s and other company’s offerings don’t appeal to me in this regard, since this is the interface they choose. What I wanted was a blog-style aggregator for all the blogs, news, etc. sites that I read daily.  Maybe it’s because I am a long-time LiveJournal user. Maybe it’s just a basic matter of taste that the blog format appeals to me much more, especially when there’s a lot of information to scan through, quickly.

At any rate, one intense evening later I had a “bloggregate.” It basically pulls together all the feeds from my favorite sites into a single page, paginated, allowing you to view today, yesterday, past week, or past month. It uses a curl backend to process several feeds at once. It even logs into password protected feeds for me to retrieve the posts I want (yes, this includes LiveJournal protected feeds which nobody seems to be able to figure out!) Individual “blog posts” have the usual link to view comments, where appropriate. And best of all? It looks lovely on the iPhone so I can be a junkie from anywhere.

This kind of play on the side often leads to a piece of code or an entire idea making it into a job one way or another. What better way to fuel what you do for a living than to do it with noodlings that you love to produce anyway?

Tags: aggregator, blogs, rss

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