A story and some new software

[{ d m p } <dmp@fray.com>]

Hi Syndicators --

Long time lurker, first time poster....

Hi! I'm Derek. I make a bunch of sites. Most of them have been around for
years, so I've just begun retrofitting them to produce RSS. After going
through the process for three of my sites, I began to feel frustrated by
how little of a payoff I was getting from the feeds. I totally get the
potential of RSS, but it felt like I was doing all this work to send my
feeds off into nowhere.

I know about Syndic8 and Dave Winer's fine efforts in this area, but since
I didn't want to use a desktop app (like Radio or Ceres), my options were
limited. And since I don't run my own server, I couldn't get any of the
aggregators I'd found to work (I can't install Perl modules). Frustrated, I
posted a kvetch to my site.

http://www.powazek.com/zoom/log/archive/00000219.shtml

What happened next is why I love the web. Ben Brown heard my plea and sat
down and wrote a personal RSS aggregator called RSS Monkey. It's simply it
allows you to grab and display RSS feeds custom templates for the output,
and can be run as a SSI without installing anything that would require a
root password.

Finally I could put up one page that displays my own feeds and updates itself!

http://www.powazek.com/rss/

I think that for RSS to be adopted by the rest of the world, and for the
average Joe to *get* syndication, it has to be made much easier. As in:
"Click here to add this feed to your site." Perhaps there's other software
out there that I don't know about (Likely!) but Ben Brown's RSS Monkey is
the first one I've found that's relatively trivial to install and use.

I thought y'all might be interested in checking it out. The software should
be available for download later today.

http://brandbenbrown.com/display.html/rssmonkey

Rock on,

-- Derek





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Derek M. Powazek, real person
 home - http://powazek.com/log/
 work - http://powazek.com/forhire/
 book - http://designforcommunity.com/