28th April, 2008
vs.com v0.0?
Monday, 10:34 am in CodeGirl
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…
Okay, so I was washing the dishes the other day, thinking about Communities on LiveJournal (as you do) and them being one of the frequently cited reasons why people don’t want to move to WordPress. The idea of RSS feed aggregators popped into my head – stuff like RSSmeme – and I was like, Hey wait a sec…
See, here’s what I’m thinking:
- You’d set up a script that would accept RSS or Atom feeds for blogs.
- Membership could be ‘open’ (anyone can ping) or closed (pings will only be accepted from listed sites).
- The script would have zero or more topics.
- Topics would match up against the
<category>tag in feeds. - Matching topics (or all posts pinged to the script, depending on how it’s set up) would then appear mirrored at the script’s site. They’d get dumped into a database, and the script would then aggregate these into a new feed, but all permalinks and comment links would be preserved from the original posts.
- Updates could either be pinged to the script (in the same way you ping blog update services now), or – in the case of ‘closed membership’ sites – fetched manually by a cronjob. The fetch would pull out the given feed and extract all topical posts.
- Profit.
If that makes sense? So, like, say I set up a aggregator for “World of Warcraft”. All site feeds with either <category>World of Warcraft</category> or <category term="World of Warcraft"/>1 would then get dumped into a summary on the script site. Yeah?
Thing is, I can’t believe something like this doesn’t already exist. Just… where? And if it doesn’t exist… I guess vs.com has just been born.
Oh, and in other news. Urban Nordica now has a Facebook page. Y’all go join, okay?
- You’d make the match alphanumeric, case insensitive (e.g.
worldofwarcraft). ^
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Comments
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I can see this having a bigger/better use than simply community replacement.
I am yet to adopt RSS as a way to keep up with websites - I “manually” browse everything, and just hop from link to link when I’m bored or looking for new material. Apart from enjoying this method of browsing, it is also easier for me to skip crap I’m not interested in.
However, if I could get some sort of compilation feed which drags in only specific topics from certain blogs (rather than anything/everything) I could increase my reading of the stuff I’m most interested in quite efficiently, and then just browse randomly to the other stuff when I’ve got the time.
I’d never really considered it before so I’ve no idea if my “wants” are already covered by something out there or how close it is to your general idea, but it’s definitely something I’d be interested in hearing more about.
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I am yet to adopt RSS as a way to keep up with websites
I did suspect this (because you always get here from your links page; I R schneaky stalker) but, Jem, dude!
It’s funny, though, because I’ve yet to run across a single reader that will let you filter content based on
<category>; it seems almost bizarre in a way since it would be such a basic feature to write. I mean, if I can do it, right?I’m one of those people who subscribes (har har) to the ‘over subscription’ model of RSS reading; I just add everything and anything I’m vaguely interested in and skim the stuff I don’t want to read on any one day. I think a lot of people make the mistake with RSS of thinking it’s like, email or something, and that they have to read every article. Nah, it’s more like a newspaper; you pick the stuff you want from the headlines and the rest is for when you need some serious procrastination.
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Yeah, I know - you’re a stats hawk like me
I have dabbled once or twice, trying to get into the whole RSS thing - even doing what you do - but find I skim more than I read which defeats the point I feel.
Oh well, there’s an opportunity for you here. Get to it!
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Stats hawk? Damn straight!
I’m way too busy at the moment to pick this project up right now, which is kind of a bummer. Maybe in a couple of months.
