Peter Breuls's Weblog

April 8th, 2005: "I don't even own a bike!"

I do now. And I like it! Still happy, too, by the way.

In this report from an OPML roadshow by Dave Winer, I see this has been discussed:

Dave "I'm the only place where people can host this stuff now, I'm trying to get out of that business as fast as possible."
People will look at cloning part of this to PHP, Perl, ASP, but Dave suggests that people would be better off porting the whole framework to Linux.

I have written a bit about this on my OPML blog:

I would like it if my OPML-blog postings could be served on my rented web space, which runs Apache on Linux. The only way to do this, on a server on which I cannot run software myself, is to port all of the OPML Community Server functionality to PHP.

I started working on this some time ago in my spare time. Because I have lots of stuff I tend to do in my spare time, the progress is very slow. I'm posting about it because I'm curious: is anyone besides myself interested in a PHP-version of the OPML Community Server? Might it be an idea to create a SourceForge project to write it?

If anyone has an opinion, please, let me know.

If you download and install all the Frontier files from this site, you can easily create your own News Aggregator? It's all there: when you run Frontier, it will create its own aggregatorData.root with all the stuff you need in it. Also, the xml.aggregator verbs are still available, so with a bit of scripting you can make it scan for new stories hourly. The only thing missing is a displayer, but for a Frontier developer, or in fact anyone with a little programming sense, it's a piece of cake to write one.

I was playing around a bit with Radio again, and found the Radio Minala theme on Steve's blog. I liked it, and my current theme got boring, so I switched to this one. It's really light, easy and simple, but it's pretty.

Maybe I'll customize it some more, put and image or two in somewhere, but then again, maybe I won't.