This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Adam Green.
Original Post: Building a Ruby news aggregator
Feed Title: ruby.darwinianweb.com
Feed URL: http://www.nemesis-one.com/rss.xml
Feed Description: Adam Green's Ruby development site
The most interesting thing about blogging my experiments with Ruby is that there is documentation on the places where I change course. As someone who is fascinated by software history, I hope more and more programmers document their progress publicly. The change I've decided to make is to scale down my first project from a complete CMS to a 'river of news' style RSS aggregator, which presents a single list combining multiple feeds. My blogs are running fine on the FoxPro code I've built already, so I'll just leave them as they are right now. One of the reasons for switching to an aggregator as a first project is that I think it would be an interesting resource. I also want to try writing a tutorial on Ruby programming on Windows, and this seems like a perfect sized project for a tutorial.
I've taken RubyRiver.org as a domain name for this project, and it should be working on a webserver in a day or so. I've got a good list of about 2 dozen feeds from blogs and resource sites, and I'd like to ask them to opt-in to being aggregated, rather than just grabbing the feeds and republishing them. I'm not really sure what the etiquette is for publishing other people's feeds. Search engines like Technorati publish the first 1-2 sentences, so I guess that is an acceptable use. Either way, I'd rather have the authors of these feeds know they are being aggregated somewhere else. The other issue is isolating the posts about Ruby. Many of these blogs cover other languages or issues, so I need a standard way for them to tag their posts, if they are willing/able to change their RSS feed. So, this is a social as well as a technical project, which qualifies it for Web 2.0.
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