“I appear to be writing an RSS reader.”
—Tom Hoffman
Tom‘s decided to jump into the RSS aggregator movement by trying to create something that will almost mimic Bloglines but within the blog. How cool would that be? While Tom likes the chronological postings of the Manila aggregator, I’ve just always liked grouping posts by author rather than time, so he’s doing me a real favor by attempting this. (But I forgot to ask if it will work IN Manila…) This would be a great asset to students or teachers with sites on our server.
The greedy person that I am, I still want to see a day where parents or community members can come to the school Website and somehow subscribe to and read school feeds all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure if Tom’s thinking along those lines, and maybe that’s stretching things a bit. But it would be cool if at some point down the road we could create a password protected page for parents on our server that would collect school news, student work, intra school communications, all that stuff in one place. Now that would be a disruptive technology.
I’m writing it in Plone, but perhaps it will inspire someone to do it in Manila. I can’t tell how flexible Manila is for this kind of thing.
It won’t be a big problem to allow people to choose from the feeds already in the system. It will be a little bit more of a problem to work out how to handle adding new feeds to the system. Those will probably need to be approved by someone before being added, to prevent abuse. I’d rather avoid that “It isn’t my fault your son sees links to Fleshbot when he logs into the school web site” discussion.
OK, I’ve got a fugly but functional version running now, which you can see if you log into the site.
Very cool…now can you get it to show just whatever is new?
Well, once you view all the current ones, then next time it will only indicate the new ones.