Abstract

The web has a growing number of writers and news sources providing interesting content. A personal tool is needed to track, filter, and manage this flow for oneself. Putting the tool on the desktop or laptop, as opposed to an external service provider, is desirable due to the control one has over the tool, the local speed of the app versus that on remote servers, and privacy of content consumption.

Assumptions

• DesktopWebAppServer exists and provides the app framework.
• Implement in Python
• Consumes RSS

Goals

• Drop-in app for DesktopWebAppServer
• Easy to use
• RadioUserland? news aggregator work-alike
  • Consume RSS to produce news log
  • Manage RSS subscriptions
  • Periodically download RSS updates
  • News log view allows manipulation
    • Sort by arrival time, source, author, etc.
    • Configurable retention time, etc.
• Interoperate with a WeblogTool?""?

Design

• RSS fetcher
  • Fired by a scheduler
  • Periodic fetching
  • List of RSS urls
• RSS digester
  • Extract all stories from all RSS channels
  • Store only new stories
• RSS channel list manage page
  • Component in DesktopWebAppServer
• News aggregation page
  • Present stored stories
  • Allow filtering and sorting
  • Component fired by DesktopWebAppServer

Tasks

Notes

• RSS
  • Item
    • title / linetext
    • link / url
    • description / text / dc->description
    • source
    • http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1
      • subject
      • date
      • creator
    • dc
      • subject
      • date
      • creator
    • http://slashcode.com/rss/1.0/modulesNewsAggregatorSlash
      • section
      • comments

Bookmarks

• Meerkat - http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/
• AmphetaDesk - http://www.disobey.org
• RadioUserland? - http://radio.userland.com

People

• DaveWiner