Hunting The Muse

I'm starting to get frustrated

I'm starting to get frustrated about RSS and syndication. What I wrote what I wrote, I just wanted to be able to find news easily and then make it so people that trust me would find it too. There are two parts to this process.

Finding the news: Well, right now I browse. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Easy, unless you're looking for a particular kind of fish. It's also easy if you know exactly what you are looking for. But with news, you don't. You just find stuff where after you read it you realize how much you wanted to read it. That's the grail here.

So browsing sucks for this purpose. Feeds work better. I choose categories I care about, OR I choose news sources (people) whose views I respect. That about covers it.

But right now, finding and reading news feeds sucks! There's a couple of websites like News Is Free that give you a web interface, but it just feels clunky - and who wants to go through the added effort to visit a website just to visit other websites? There are these newsfeed aggregator services that you can download and run, but they just feel kind of unavailable - download, run, connect to your own secret webserver on a special port... Peerkat is one, AmphetaDesk is another - they are okay, but they get overwhelming fast. Peerkat because adding new feeds is tedious, AmphetaDesk because there isn't a way to trash the articles when you're done with them. And then there's the whole second part of this...

Syndicating The News: Say I find an article in my research that I think should get more distribution - I want to filter it into my own outgoing news feed that other folks are subscribing to. The only bits of software I know of so far that can kind of do this are Peerkat and Radio Userland. Radio is pretty cool and I might actually start using it soon (once I get my Mac). But it still is missing what I think the grail is...

I just want it to be easy! Some sort of plugin I can just install into my browser. Something that'll show me my new news, let me delete them as I read them like an email inbox, let me arrange them how I want, and let me republish my favorites. It will notice duplicates, it will put 'em together, and it will let me Big-Fat-Publish-Button them into my own feed that will automatically be noticed and seen by someone else that subscribes to my feed just the same as I subscribe to other feeds.

I *don't* want to have to go to another url on another port. I don't want to have to install my own separate web server, I don't want to have to install an entire new software suite to make this work - I just want it to drop into my normal workflow.

So I think the answer is Mozilla. Writing a mozilla plugin through mozdev.org . But if there's another answer that is easier, I want to hear it. Posted by Curt at June 5, 2002 09:06 PM