Standing in the way of control!

Yesterday I read about a new feed reader created by two South Africans here. I was apprehensive at first but decided to try it out anywayand was mightily surprised by what I found at Feed Me. I am a sucker for cool, clean cut and stylish interfaces. My current reader just cannot seem to produce the same type of eye candy. Currently Feed Me! is looking for a new name so it is a work in progress.

I contacted one of the developers Leroux Bodenstein and he supplied me with the following answer to my question at to how they came about the idead of creating a new feed aggregator:

 I noticed that Newshutch had been down for a while. I stopped using it
during a period of time when they had performance problems and they
made some interface changes I didn’t like, but early on I was
completely blown away by the interface. I thought it was a bit of a
shame that they were no longer online. Then I realised that using all
the free libraries that are available for python nowadays it shouldn’t
be too difficult to write something like that as a pet project, so I
built one in my free time. The initial version only took a few
evenings.

Long ago I used bloglines, but I find their interface horrible. I have
tried some other feed readers, but none of them ever really impressed
me.

I primarily built it for myself, but it is a web app so it is easy to
let others use it and if someone else finds it useful, then that would
be nice. I’m not planning to ever make money from it and I can’t think
of any viable business model for a feed reader anyway, plus it is
essentially a rip-off of Newshutch. So.. because of that and the
remote possibility that someone might find the code useful I decided
to opensource it. This way others can run their own feed readers if
they want to.

Initially I mostly copied ideas from Newshutch, but I also copied some
from tank and incorporated some of my own ideas. The shades of gray is
because I’m no designer. That’s basically why I kept it so simple.

I find that it saves me lots of time. I’m going to procrastinate
anyway and at least this way I get it all done in one go and I don’t
have to go look at all the sites that get updated infrequently. (This
isn’t for keeping up to date on sites that get updated 20 times per
day. If you’re into reading techcrunch or engadget, then you’re
probably on those sites refreshing all the time anyway)

thisarmy is Alan Alston and myself. We build http://withtank.com/

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