The Read and Trust network of writers comprises a group of indies that are recommended by those we read and trust. I’m not sure who ‘we’ are but the quality of the list is excellent and well worth adding to your feeds.
While visiting their site, I noticed that one can download an OPML file of the entire Read and Trust network, allowing for quick and easy subscription to all the writers in one fell swoop. As a certified OPML nut, of course I grabbed the file. Not only did I add it to my daily feed reading, but I have plans to use the file as my guinea pig.
Allow me to elaborate..
As any reader of mine is aware, I’m an EC2 Poet. In other words, I have my own Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud server (micro instance) running the OPML Editor 24/7. Up until yesterday, my EC2 has dutifully been dishing up my RSS feeds in a river of news format for me.
Now, yesterday, Dave Winer added an important feature to the OMPL Editor. Multi-user support for the River2 news aggregator tool. I’ve been looking forward to this feature because now my EC2 can not only host my RSS feeds, but it can also host another user’s feeds.
The first thing I did was create an imaginary user, ‘readandtrust’ and imported the OPML file I had downloaded earlier. Create a password just for this new user and that’s it. It worked!
Now that my EC2 has two users, I’m going to add a third imaginary user (I’m in full on test mode right now) and then start taking notes. The multi-user implementation has a few kinks to iron out so I hope to help facilitate its progress by putting it through its paces.
The Read and Trust river of news is pass protected so I can’t show it to you. But here’s my river, pushed to my Dropbox, for public consumption, to show you essentially what it looks like. Imagine the Read and Trust network of feeds flowing through instead of my own set of feeds.