The Hindu : A personal on-line news aggregation service

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Monday, Sep 08, 2003

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Business

A personal on-line news aggregation service

THIS WEEK NetSpeak features a few tools that can be deployed to create private on-line news aggregation services.

Several web sites publish regularly details of their new content in an XML-based standard format called RSS (Rich Site Summary). The products that can read RSS feeds and enable us to subscribe to the news feeds of our choice are called news aggregators. There are two types of news aggregators available — web-based and desktop based. In the past, this column has featured several news aggregators that belong to both categories.

Desktop aggregation services are of no use when you are away from your PC. On-line aggregators help you read the RSS feeds of specified web sites via a single web page.

But as on-line services are provided by external entities over which you have little control, you may like to have an on-line service run completely on your site. The main advantage is you can access it from any place, any time while having the data still under your complete control. Here we explore a couple of free PHP-based news aggregator scripts that let you create your own web-based news aggregators. (PHP is a widely used general purpose scripting language that is especially sited for web development.) All you need is access to a web server with MySQL and PHP support.

FeedonFeeds

FeedonFeeds (http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/) is a set of PHP scripts that can be used to subscribe and display RSS feeds on your web site. To implement the service, download the archive file, expand it to a directory (say `feedonfeeds-0.1.1') and move it on to the web server directory where the web pages are stored. Create a database to store the feed data and assign a user with a password to this database. Now, make the necessary alterations in the `config.php' file, point your browser to the URL: http://localhost/feedonfeeds-0.1.1/install.php.

If everything is in place, the install script will create the necessary tables and finish the installation process with the message "Go to the control panel and start subscribing". Now your web-based news aggregator is ready and you can access it at: http://your_site-name/feedonfeeds- 0.1.1/.

First, add the RSS feeds of your interest and click on the `Update all' button to read the latest postings available on your favourite sites.

Another tool worth testing is the ZvonFeeds (http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zvonfeeds.php), also a PHP-based product. The significance of this tool is that you can implement an on-line news aggregator service even if your web account does not have a database support. In fact, after downloading the file archive it will take just one or two minutes to launch your server-based aggregator service.

To set-up the service, as usual, expand the archive into a directory (say `ZvonFeeds'), upload this directory with all the files and sub-directories on to the document root of your web site. At this point, if you need any help, read the help file `readme.html', which will give the installation procedure. Now, enter the URL: http://your-site-name/zvonfeeds/newsfeeds/admin.php and access the administration menu. Here you will find a list of RSS feeds already subscribed by the system for you. You can delete the unwanted ones and add new ones. Once the set-up is ready, you can access the on-line aggregator using the URL: http://your-site-name/zvonfeeds/newsfeeds/ zvonfeeder.php.

Before winding up this part of the column, it would be appropriate to introduce two new news aggregation products recently stumbled on by this author. One is an on-line free news aggregation service called MyWireService (http://www.mywireservice.com/) that creates a customised news web-page for you where the service automatically displays the contents of all the RSS-feeds subscribed by you.

Another is the beta version of the extremely feature-packed desktop news aggregator FeedDemon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/). FeedDemon, though a new entrant in this field, has many attractive features. It comes with a number of Channel groups which deal with a variety of subjects that include `Blogs and Blogging', Entertainment, Health and Technology. Each group contains several RSS-feeds related to a specific subject. So, if you want to read the latest `Technology' news just select the `Technology' group, FeedDemon will immediately download and list out the RSS-feeds related to `technology' available in its database. It also has features such as `Newspaper' that displays news items from a selected channel, `News Bin' tool that can be used to store news items `you wish to remember' and the facility to e-mail news stories directly from the program's interface.

We have seen many browsers with varying features. Now, why not create a browser with an interface tuned to your tastes and requirements? The browser toolkit, BrowserBob (http://www.browserbob.com /index.html) is worth a trial if you want to have a customised personal browser. The toolkit can be used to create a browser of any shape whose interface buttons can be placed anywhere. Also, you can choose any images to represent the various interface buttons for such functions as Back, Forward and Refresh. A browser with your own interface can be created within seconds using this program — you just have to drag and drop certain objects and adjust their properties. To test the tool, download the free version from: http://www.browserbob.com/Version 12_for_free.html

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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