RSS aggregators for non-technical folk

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:
> I just wanted to make you folks aware of the new community aggregator we put
> up at harvard.edu.
> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/aggregator

There's a lot to be said for server-side aggregators for people who 
don't have the technical smarts to cope with client side. The trick I 
think is to do it in an environment where the usage is naturally limited 
by the audience. I think trying to do it on a big scale as the only 
reason for the site is doomed as the bandwidth cost rises with success.

Most of the php-Nuke and Slashclone sites have been able to read RSS for 
a while now and present it for their members but so far these have been 
controlled by the administrator. It's basically too hard for members to 
suggest new feeds and to get them added to the roster. My own site's RSS 
displayer is as good an example of this as any (blows own trumpet)
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=import [1]

I've recently written a new client side aggregator for myself in PHP 
(I've already got apache, php, mysql installed) and I've been playing 
with an idea for extending this so that members have their own dailenews 
based on the feeds they pick. I guess this is kind of the same thing 
Dave is doing.

This approach should also be more friendly to RSS sources in that each 
feed only gets collected once but multiple people read it. And we can 
put the effort in to support last-modified and etags. Against that, 
since the members will put any old URL in we have to write validation 
code to make sure there really is RSS on the end.

[1]Incidentally, we turn this into a daily newsletter that is completely 
automatic and built from the most recent entries in each category

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