Simple single-page aggregation?

November 5, 2006 12:37 PM

I want to aggregate some RSS feeds for a group of not-tech-savvy people...

...and I like the single page apporach best, where a bunch of feeds are rendered on one page with pop-up article previews - you know, like Popurls or Original Signal. My question: are there any CC- or GNU-licensed templates to get the job done? I could write everything myself, but I'm lazy and I'd rather tweak than work from scratch. (Also, I know setting up RSS to Javascript or however you render the feeds needs to be set up on a server; no big deal.)

posted by symbebekos to technology (7 comments total)

I use netvibes.com myself, but as far as a homebrew application goes I'm sure there are OPML (a kind of bookmarks file for all of your feeds) renderers and AJAX libraries in your chosen language. The pop up stuff is probably only javascript containers for what is already in the feed (I know, some feeds don't include any body text), so a couple of modules should get you most of the way there.
posted by rhizome at 12:59 PM on November 5, 2006

Check out Planet Software. If you've got a web server to host it (with python) it does a terrific job.
posted by roue at 1:40 PM on November 5, 2006

sorry, bad link. that's Planet Software.
posted by roue at 1:40 PM on November 5, 2006

Ditto on Planet. I just used it for a project at work. No problems at all, and although it doesn't have fancy pop-ups, you have complete control over the HTML template, and so could set up something like Popurls.

An easy alternative woiuld be to set up the feeds as public in Bloglines and then just point them to that page. The downside is that you don't get even a river-of-news style rendering until you click over on the left side, let alone an array-of-titles layout.
posted by troyer at 1:52 PM on November 5, 2006

I second NetVibes.
posted by nyu2 at 2:28 PM on November 5, 2006

For hosted web accounts, which'd normally be a PHP-MySQL affair, Drupal comes with an aggregator, it shows things in 'river' view, and you can make the aggregator be Drupal's default view.

It does quite a lot of other stuff, too.
posted by genghis at 2:58 PM on November 5, 2006

I use Newshutch, and love it. I am not tech-savvy at all, and I find that it's totally user-friendly instead of intimidating. Plus, you needn't download any software to access it (think of it like Vox, but for RSS).
posted by numinous at 4:17 PM on November 6, 2006