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Author Topic: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators  (Read 4988 times)

tinyvillager

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Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« on: March 28, 2006, 08:03 PM »


  I bought hosting three months ago for my domain and have yet do anything with it except use
it for email.I'm a procrastenater (i think i spelled that right) anyhow i want to create a link blog
that consists of rss/atom feeds like http://www.dailyrotation.com/ or something along those lines.
I was wondering if anyone out there has experience with such an issue.Failures,snafus,successes.

 Anyhow any input will be appreciated. :)

allen

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2006, 09:36 PM »
I'm not sure what you're asking, so . . . feel free to elaborate :)

How do you define success?  As far as profitability is concerned, it takes a lot of work and social networking to make a website sufficiently profitable.  However, if you define success (as I do) as creating something that works sufficiently enough to please a handful of people who appreciate it, then you should have no trouble.  Generating dynamic content from syndicated feeds is a relative breeze and the result is an informative, fresh website -- as opposed to a flat, stagnating cob-web haven.

That said, if you're going to be writing the system to handle this yourself you should decide before you start whether you want to control the feeds exclusively or if you want to make it possible for users to customize their own accounts -- as adding customization after completing a singular implementation would surely be a big hastle, taking as much time as the original project.  Also keep caching in mind -- for the sake of your own machine, sure, but more importantly the websites you'll be drawing the feeds from.  It'll speed things up drastically as well as prevent over-drawing from the blogs/news you're getting your data from.

A side note, where procastination is concerned, you're not doing too bad.  I have a friend who nabbed a domain name/hosting something like 5 years ago or more -- with every intent of doing something with it.  To this day, it's just used for e-mail.

tinyvillager

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2006, 12:24 PM »
 Thanks for response.

 I have modest expectations with no finacial gain.I want to keep it very simple,no individual settings,what
you see is what you get...text.My ideal is to set a page into a subdomain (i know how to do stuff like that
and database managment,etc.)i guess the insecurity or question is how to split Feeds from different sites
into there own catagories and have them display their headlines about ten deep.I would want it to cache
the links for speed,i want everything on my side of the fence.I tried something called Magpie ages ago,
it makes wonder if i'd need multiple installations of an aggregator since i want info from so many different
sources.It's a puzzle i have to rap my head around.This project might very well end up being a cob-web haven,but it's a learning thing.Once i get around how to do the background issues i can sex it up with css/ajax,etc.

Here is a crude layout.   

Veign

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2006, 12:38 PM »
Basically looking to build something like:
http://popurls.com/

tinyvillager

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #4 on: March 29, 2006, 12:57 PM »
Bookmarked that-
 
 Oh now that's pretty,never seen this before.Been searching around i might go for and build on top of this
http://lylina.sourceforge.net/-but will keep http://popurls.com/ in mind as a heavy influence.

Thanks for sharing.

mouser

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #5 on: March 29, 2006, 01:29 PM »
im interested in what you find tinyvillager - basically you are looking for a php script or some other server script that cant be configured to build a page of headlines/links/rss feeds.  i know there are some but i dont know how they stack up and i'm looking forward to your report.

tinyvillager

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Re: Need advice from a web designer on feed aggregators
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2006, 01:43 PM »
Roger that,

i will get back to this thread with my results.