With more and more sites offering RSS feeds of their content, it’s become possible to look at changes to web sites, such as new news articles and forums posts, in the same way as your e-mail inbox. The aim of this project was to make a simple viewer for these feeds and manage which articles have already been viewed. Many applications are already popping up that support this functionality, such as Google Reader[1] and the popular e-mail client Mozilla Thunderbird[2], but these are fully fledged applications in their own right. To avoid re-inventing the wheel, a further aim of this project is to be much lighter weight than these products. The resulting code for this news reader can then be slotted into a web sites existing content.

As with the previous MUSICBOX project, the application is made from a web page that accesses another program on the server that is downloading the feeds and keeping track of read/deleted articles. The user selects which feed they would like to view, and the page asks the server for the latest list of articles.

RUNNING THE APPLICATION

To view a demo of the application, which has been configured with a handful of useful news feeds, please click the following link:

• READ THE NEWS

Acknowledgements, references and notes:

[1] Google Reader

http://www.google.com/reader

[2] Mozilla Thunderbird

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/