I love my local news RSS feeds and you’ll have to pry them from my cold dead feed reader, but they are absolutely flooding me with feed items. I’ve been spending the last week or so trying to build a filtering system that would make the information flow a little more manageable. Finally this evening […]
Building a Local News Aggregator With 1000+ Sources
Last week I went poking around and found a local news sources dataset from the Media and Democracy Project. I used that as a quarry and mined it for RSS feeds with a couple of Google Apps Scripts. I’m not finished with that dataset but so far I’ve come up with 1008 verified RSS feeds for local news sources in America.
An Updated Version of the OPML Peeler
One of the many web sites I’ve scattered everywhere is RSS Gizmos ( https://rssgizmos.com/ ) which has a number of tools for discovering, creating, and using RSS. One of them is OPML Peeler, which takes an OPML file (OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language; an OPML file in this context is basically a bundle […]
Your Regular Reminder That Tons of People Are On Reddit
Wow, I just got a serious reminder of the Power of Reddit. I’m making a new tool to monitor breakout pages in specified Wikipedia categories as a new kind of topical information trap. One of the test categories I’m using is Androgynous people and that’s how I found out about an 18th/19th century preacher named […]
ResearchBuzz Firehose Turns 10
I started ResearchBuzz in 1998 after finishing the 2nd edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. As time went by I started feeling the lack of organization. I was linking to and looking at lots and lots of resources, but I was posting them in aggregate newsletters which made specific resources tough to find. […]
RSS With An Expiration Date: The Temporary Obsessions Feed Reader
I love RSS; I literally couldn’t do my self-appointed job without it. But when it comes to temporarily monitoring topics, RSS feeds are a bit unwieldy; you have to add another layer of workflow to add/remove feeds, set up reminders for yourself, etc. All that has hitherto discouraged me from using RSS when there was […]
What’s Going on With Dick York’s Wikipedia Page?
Wikipedia Hot Topics has handed me a mystery. The site takes one of Wikipedia’s daily top 1000 article lists and reorganizes it by recent increases in page views (as opposed to overall page views). The reordered list provides an overview from Wikipedia, page view information, links to date-bounded Google News searches for the page’s most-visited […]
VibesMasto Gets an Overhaul and a Web Version
Saturday I dug out the VibesMasto News Monitor so I could monitor news about the protests around the country. It was very useful but it also made me cringe. I first made this tool about two years ago when I knew a lot less about JavaScript, and its code is CRUSTY. Uncrusting it became yesterday’s […]
My Dream RSS Reader is Working WAY Too Well
In late November I put together a homebrew RSS reader to address some of my challenges in trying to keep up with thousands of RSS feeds. I knew at the time that I wasn’t going to immediately get a sense of how well it worked because we were heading into the December holidays. I’d have […]
Keep An Eye on the Fediverse With the Mastodon Hashtag Monitor
Over 15 years ago I wrote a book called Information Trapping. It was about how to set up online monitors to find online information around certain keywords and keep it coming as a flow to you via tools like RSS, page monitors, etc. As you might imagine, Information Trapping’s resources and tool listings are very […]