Zilla Smash!

My internship this summer is a paid one, and while I’m making sure to save most of it having money brings along a certain temptation to spend it. To facilitate that I’ve been collecting RSS feeds of sites like fatwallet, techbargains, and the SA Coupons forum so that I can monitor them for good deals on the stuff I want. What I didn’t think about was just how much movement there is on these feeds. I set up a folder in Bloglines for all my “shopping” feeds and it quickly galloped to 500 unread items. I love reading feeds in Bloglines, but I don’t have time to even scan through that much just to find the one or two items I want!

So I’m going to do something about it. There’s a high probability something like this exists already, but it’s a fun side project to keep me from getting too rusty. I don’t get much DB interaction at the internship so doing some design and implementation work to stay sharp is a good thing. I’m working on a flexible RSS filtering system. You tell it the feeds you want it to watch, what you want it to watch for, and what you want to call it. Using a shared RSS DB/updater (I have a few other projects that deal with RSS I’m kicking around) this system will scan the feeds you told it to and build a feed of items that match the filter(s) you’ve set up for them. This output can them be consumed in your feed reader of choice, without turning a firehose of coupons and deals onto your face. Thinking about it, I actually already know something like this exists. Since I have a few issues with the implementation, I’m going to create my own less flexible version! The danger of stubborn people that can bang on a keyboard and have it do things…

If anyone’s interested in this I’ll let them in on the URL once I have something working. Right now it’s a DB schema and some forms that aren’t hooked up to the backend in any meaningful way. I had to get the central RSS DB up and running first though, and now that it’s running and updating all it’s feeds via Magpie I can continue with the filtering bit. Centralizing the RSS updating/storage is a definite Good Thing, as it means I only need one feed parser setup and won’t be grabbing duplicated feeds. Definitely gonna toss some YUI libraries into the mix for some oh-so-delicious JS, and I’ll probably try working on this using Aptana because it is shiny. SFTPDrive rules for this kind of thing by the way.