Help me aggregate my food blogs

February 19, 2010 12:07 AM

Looking for a web app or site that will allow me to view multiple webpages simultaneously. Think Google Chrome new tab page, but live.

I read a bunch of food blogs. They update at different intervals and most are pretty bad about having decent RSS service on them. As I also prefer to see a visualization of the sites, typical RSS sites like Google reader don't work for me. I've also tried netvibes, bloglines and igoogle but all with unsatisfactory results.

So what I want is a page that I can tile 6 or 8 websites on. Customizable to move the sites around so I can see them as I wish. The Google Chrome new tabs page is awesome, except it shows a cached image, not a real-time version. So with it I cannot see any new updates.

Website, web app, firefox extention, or any other idea is appreciated. If I cannot find anything, I'm afraid I'm going to have to code my own just to get what I am looking for.

Thanks.

posted by wile e to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Safari's Top Sites page does this.
posted by quadog at 12:15 AM on February 19, 2010

Lotus Notes can do this i think... but of course it doesnt make sense for an individual. Why not just write a page with a number of Iframes ? Shouldnt take longer than 5 minutes, and you can wrap them into any windowing js library you can find.
posted by 3mendo at 12:40 AM on February 19, 2010

Would hopefully like to get this to work in either Firefox or Chrome, so Safari is out for now. Thanks though.

I plan on building one myself if I can't find a ready made solution, but wanted to see if it was available already or not.
posted by wile e at 12:57 AM on February 19, 2010

i haven't tried it - but it seems like split browser plus reload every will do this in firefox.
posted by nadawi at 1:13 AM on February 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I just tried Split Browser today, It seems to work. It allows you to split and re-split vertically and horizontally. It also has a "tile all tabs" command and a scroll lock. Pretty cool.
posted by doctor_negative at 1:30 AM on February 19, 2010

They update at different intervals and most are pretty bad about having decent RSS service on them. As I also prefer to see a visualization of the sites, typical RSS sites like Google reader don't work for me.

Are you using the visualization of the sites just so you can spot when they've updated? Google Reader now also allows you to monitor sites that don't have RSS feeds, or that have crappy ones. (They generate a feed for the site themselves using their web crawler).

If there are other reasons for needing the visualization this won't help, but I thought it worth flagging up in case you haven't tried Reader recently.
posted by bonaldi at 3:56 AM on February 19, 2010

Does it have to be on one single page? Otherwise you could just define a folder in your Firefox bookmarks and right-click to get "open all in tabs".

On the other hand you could use a service like ChangeDetection or a program like WebMon to see if there is anything new on those pages.
posted by PontifexPrimus at 4:03 AM on February 19, 2010

FWIW, "reload every" functionality is built into the great Firefox add-on Tab Mix Plus.
posted by AugieAugustus at 6:08 AM on February 19, 2010