Published September 27th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
Switched to “Feed on Feeds”
For a long time I’ve used NewsIsFree as my Aggregator. Its got a couple of cool features (e.g. some scraped feeds for some sites not supporting RSS). The way I’ve always used it was to have it send me an email every day with the news items, which I thin read in order to figure out what was new. It wasn’t perfect, far from it, it was often down, and articles dissapeared from its database fairly rapidly, but it was good enough. NewsIsFree always seemed to walk a tightrope between being a free service and a pay service, and slowly over time all of the useful features have dissapeared into the pay service. Late last week, without warning, the email notification serice went this way as well.
I’d been meaning to hack together my own RSS reader anyway, so the recent changes with NewsIsFree prompted me to make a change. What I’using now is feed on feeds. FoF is dead simple to use and built in PHP, making it very hackable. As the site says…
It keeps track of what items you’ve read, and keeps happily checking up on your feeds no matter where you are. Whenever you want to see what’s new, you just bring up a web page and scan the newest items. You can mark the items as read so they won’t be shown again. Or, you can just always show the most recent N items, like the way LiveJournal’s friends pages work.
About all a news reader really needs to be honest. I wanted a server based solution, I’m trying to give myself maximum flexibility by using web based apps wherever possible. Theres a few little changes I want to make, but by and large FoF does everythign I need, sparing me the effort of writing something from scratch.