Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I’m blogging this in hopes that someone with more time might do this.

A couple entries ago I mentioned that I wanted a news feed aggregator that works like my livejournal friend’s page. It’s just a single list in my browser that mixes together all my entries into a single list.

Ernie mentioned syndigator which does allow for entries to be mixed, but it uses the three pane paradigm and doesn’t allow me to see more than one entry at a time. The other major downside is that since it’s an external program, it tries requires lots of application switching with the web browser as I follow links.

So learning from Google’s desktop search, I think a good way to implement a news reader is to make it a local web server. Have it poll feeds in the background and download them locally. When you want to read news, you point your favorite browser to the local web server and it serves up your news. It would have the benefit of working seamlessly with your browser and the benefits of having a local copy (e.g., specialized search, archiving, annotations, whatever).

Sure, you could use something like bloglines or a livejournal friend’s page to get a news feed in your favorite browser, but I’m in need of a client side solution. At work, there are plenty of internal blogs that I would like to subscribe to, but can’t put in my livejournal friend’s list because it’s sensitive data.

This should be relatively simple to implement in python as it comes with an HTTP server and Universal Feed Parser can be used to parse almost any feed.