Slash Dot Dash

This week I’ve been mostly hacking away on new features for trawlr.com my personal online RSS agregator (it was built to scratch an itch). Apart from the Web 2.0 enhancements (check out the awesome logo, and not at all cliche), I’ve improved the security with role-based authentication (dull) and finally added RSS 2.0 feeds (very cool).

Having an RSS feed means that I can now use any desktop RSS reader (including offline reading) yet still enjoy the convenience of managing my feed subscriptions from a single website. Personally I wanted this feature so that I can use a widget or system tray notifier program to alert me when new items are added.

The RSS feed combines items from all your feeds in a mashup style (as per the website river-of-news view). It also provides a facility to get an RSS feed for a given tag, so for a feed of my Favourite sources I can subscribe to the following:

http://www.trawlr.com/rss/ben/Favourite/rss.xml

For Mac OS X, I have found a very handy tray notifier program (as shown by the RSS icon in the screen-shot of the system tray from my desktop below). The program is called RSS Menu and is available for free (donations welcome).

There is also an RSS dashboard widget, RSS Reader, that looks useful if you prefer widgets.

Have fun..!!