Slashdot Mirror

... it's also not that hard to write your own. There are plenty of perl/python/whatever rss libraries out there to do all of the hard work, and then you just need to spend some time fiddling with CSS to make it look pretty. Here's what I created about 10 years ago, before all of these other things existed:

http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/headlines.pl

(Well, maybe those other things existed. I certainly didn't know about them though.)

http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/headlines.pl

Now I'm torn - do I keep using the headlines page I wrote a few years ago, or do I start playing with Google's stuff? I know I will always have control of the first case, but the second case is so much cooler...

When I had the need to collect lots of news sources together (mostly due to being sick of oodles of ads), I sat down one afternoon and wrote my own. Over the last couple of years I've slowly evolved it into the masterpiece (ha!) that it is today.

I actually wrote my news aggregator as a direct response to ads - when Slashdot went off on its "ads and subscriptions" idea and Yahoo's front page turned into an ad-fest instead of an information source, I whipped that up to collect news for me. I guess I will just have to change it to remove links that check in with Google's ad server if I need to...

I bought a brand-new VW Golf in March of 2004 (yeah, I know, it isn't a hybrid). When I did I decided to keep track of every fillup I did in the car to find out exactly how it has done. I then whipped out a couple perl scripts to do some analysis. It's generated some interesting (for some definitions of "interesting") graphs and tables for me to stare at. Have a look at its webpage for an example.

But I already have my own news aggregator!

http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/hea dlines.pl

Or... you could write your own. It isn't very hard:

http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/hea dlines.pl