Saturday, March 16, 2013

ZFeed

ZFeed.zolmeister.com (Source)

ZFeed is an app I wrote for the Sails.js hackathon. Basically It's a front-end that I find useful for consuming my Google Reader RSS feed. I have all of my subscriptions in one feed, and every day I go through and read/glance at every single article in it (~70 per day). However, I had a few issues with how Google was showing me my articles, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.


The key features of ZFeed are the design, integration with Google Reader (to manage subscriptions), and most importantly its page summary functionality (also the J, and K shortcut keys). I subscribe to both /r/technology and 100pt+ Hacker News, which normally do not have any description other than the title of the page. Not having a page summary is not cool, so I integrated the reader with embed.ly to give consistent summaries of almost every article.

I started developing ZFeed at my desktop, but finished it (and deployed) from here (Utah):


Which meant I had to do all my work on my netbook. This worked out ok, the biggest problem was my lack of enthusiasm for testing so it ended up being pretty buggy and crashing constantly (it's still pretty buggy).

I would go into detail on how to use the Reader API, except that Google is shutting it down (announced 3 days after I made this). I am heartbroken, but I see this as an opportunity to write my own RSS service (if I don't end up finding another alternative service with equivalent API).