Project Blipfeed

Managed to find the time for a hack this week (finally). I’m starting to notice the difference these hacks are making, which is nice. It wasn’t too long ago that I was getting rather frustrated at the simpler aspects of programming.

I’ve missed quite a few of the hacks (5/10?), due to university and other side projects. It has crossed my mind that I could save these up and do a larger project or maybe a collaborative project? If you’d be interested in collaborating, please get in touch.

This week I carried on a project from the second week of hacking, namely an RSS reader which I’ve dubbed Blipfeed. When I first started the project, it was more of a “this would be kinda neat” thing. This week took it beyond that.

Currently, RSS feels like a bit of a chore. I usually end up scrolling through a large list of posts, and watching the unread counter go down rather than engaging with the content. It’s very rare that i’ll actually read a post in its entirety through Google Reader, if I do engage with a post, I’ll often view it on their site as it’s usually easier to read. So much is wrong with that right there. I’ve chosen to subscribe to sites I’m interested in. The content they’re producing hasn’t changed but when viewed through Google Reader, it’s often uninteresting.

Blipfeed is going to be a new take on the consumption of RSS feeds, the motivation stemming from this monotony that is using applications like Google Reader. The focus isn’t on aesthetics, but the experience you get when using the app and how the functionality of the app is presented to the user. I want to make consuming content via RSS interesting again.

Current Status:

Account system is working.
Basic feed parsing has been implemented and is working.
Addition/Removal of feeds is working.

3 Responses to ‘Project Blipfeed’

Luke
March 18, 2011

“It’s very rare that i’ll actually read a post in its entirety through Google Reader, if I do engage with a post, I’ll often view it on their site as it’s usually easier to read.”

This rings very true with me. I actually gave up RSS feeds a long time ago for this very reason, so I’m very interested in what you are going to come up with!

Axel
March 28, 2011

This kind of sounds like Feedly but I might be mistaken

Feedly takes the chore out of RSS feeds and lets you view them in a more pleasant form. It also has stuff like “read later”.

http://www.feedly.com/

- Ralph Saunders
  March 28, 2011
  
  I think Feedly is most definitely an approach to the same problem, but I think Blipfeed is approaching that problem from a different perspective.
  
  Feedly takes a very functional approach to the consumption of content, displaying them more like an online magazine would display its articles rather than the way conventional RSS readers choose to display articles.
  
  What I want to do with Blipfeed is make the consumption of the content a more enjoyable experience and remove that monotony and noise that you get with readers like Google Reader and to a lesser extent, Feedly.