I've had an idea for a while. I subscribe to a ton of blogs, 98% of which are programmers. Once in awhile I'll come across a post that I really need to save for later. RSS just doesn't cut these kinds of posts because even though comments are syndicated, I go to the website to view the full thing more than I use RSS Bandit to view the post + comments.
My thought was to develop a database backend that I could use to pull entire posts + comments into. It would sort of be like a “offline blog” that I can use to read certain posts from certain authors for certain reasons. Since there are umpteen Longhorn blogs I subscribe to, it'd be wonderful to have one place I can go that has all of the snippets I want to look at, rather than try to run through RSS Bandit or some other tool to “manually remember” which post I need to see. Sure I can search, but I'm difficult.
Pros
- Automatic downloading - Keeps track of certain posts so if they're updated by the author or comments are added, it updates the database
- Posts + Comments - Posts themselves are useful, but I've found some super important “nuggets“ of information hidden in comments that are extremely hard to find without a aggrigator that uses the CommentAPI like RSS Bandit
- Fully rendered pages - screen shots, clips, everything will be included so you can see the post as if you were on the website
- Offline storage - Do I really have to explain this?
- Backup - You could backup your entire blog at home, or in the case of complete failure everywhere you can “request“ your users send you the information so that you can rebuild your blog. Say geekswithblogs.net had a database corruption, I would be screwed with no way to rebuild my blog other than the RSS feed I have in RSS Bandit for my own blog (yeah I'm narcissistic)
Cons
- Copyright - You don't want everyone in the world having your information and using it as if it were their own. Like they can't do this with your RSS feed now?
Someone's pretty much already did this to a degree. It's not quite the vision I had but they're leading me in the right direction. The post I'm referring to is here. I'd like to say 2 things to both Greg and Scott:
1) Damn you
2) Thank you
Damn you for almost taking my idea and making it free. I spent numerous “toilet hours” 1 thinking of how to do this in such a way that would make it unique yet useful. I know I'll gain use from this if no one else, which is the basis for practically everything I program.
Thank you for proving that this can be done. I'll take what you started and make my vision. It will be free for all, period. I don't believe in charging for anything blog related because I spent $0 on my blog here at geekswithblogs.net (Thanks Jeff, I will give if you ever needed it).
1 Toilet hours - Time spent brainstorming some of the best ideas I've ever had. This occurs only when I'm taking a dump. I have time on my hands during this so I might as well put it to some good use even if the smell sometimes impairs my thinking.