reBlog – hacking a simple metablogging system out of Feed on Feeds. I’ve been kicking around the server-side Aggregators that I could find. Feed on Feeds certainly kicks the stuffing out of rNews (and is cleaner as well: all the code isn’t in one big file). I’m in the process of making some changes, including republishing (either as a post or linklog format) and some interface changes that I’ll hope to send upstream soon.

Things I’m working on:

  • Multiple category filtering and visual grouping
  • One-click link-logging (w/ via), reposting
  • Entry diffing/updates
  • Ability to parse invalid feeds

I’ve switched pretty much exclusively to using Apple’s Mail.app for day to day mail reading. For the most part, it’s a pretty good experience. It definitely handles both Courier and Sun IMAP better than Mozilla (only Courier gotcha is manually setting the INBOX prefix). There are a couple things that really bug me however:

  • Not being able to filter by unread, custom flags; this is incredibly useful in Moz/TBird
  • No advanced search; pretty lame
  • No keyboard shortcuts for lots of things (err, expand all maybe?)
  • Doesn’t remember my preferences, for thread expansion, source viewing, etcc.
  • Can disable image loading, but can’t disable HTML rendering completely

Some tools that may help:

  • Re: Shell based text editor for writing prose – highlights vim’s lack of ability to automatically reflow text. In theory one could bind a script to run on each keystroke and constantly reflow (or count and reflow when necessary?)
  • SourceForge P2P projects
  • Semantic Blogging

    The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging. Our intuition is that semantic principles can be applied to enrich and extend the blogging metaphor. We use the bibliography management domain to focus our efforts and to provide grounding for our demonstrator. However, we envisage that our efforts will be (or should be) applicable to more than just the bibliography domain. In addition, if we can show how the semantic web can add value, within the context of a pre-existing, popular and powerful metaphor, then it will make a convincing showcase for the semantic web.