I cannot begin to write how absolutely psyched I am right now. Thanks to some help from Mark Fletcher at Bloglines, I’ve created a hack (yes, me, a hacker) to use Bloglines as a personalized news aggregator allowing people to check boxes from a list of my school’s feeds and view them in a Bloglines account. I don’t even know if I’m describing it accurately, but you get the idea. Now I can say to parents or administrators or whoever, you want an easy way of keeping track of what’s going on around here? Go here, click the info you want to track, hit submit, create your Bloglines account (or login) and start reading. WAY TOO COOL!
It takes a little bit of html to update the subscription page, but it’s not much more than copy and paste. And considering what I think will do to promote the concept, it’s well worth the time. Please check it out and tell me what you think or if you have any problems. RSS at HCHRS…Perfect Together! (For the uninitiated, that’s an old NJ promo from the 80s…remember them???)
This is on the right track, Will. I can’t help but impotently grit my teeth a little when I read about this kind of idea, however, because it just reminds me that Rael Dornfest’s little Peerkat application did just this kind of thing in a very cool way–you could aggregate feeds, filter out things you didn’t want, and crank them out in categories or one big feed. Of course, it was really just a quick hack that needed a community to quickly coalesce around it to make robust enough for production use, but I think it was ahead of its time and never got any traction.