Things are progressing in River2Land.
After the Joyent migration, I asked my web host to create an ‘A’ record for river.donovanwatts.com to point to my EC2 River2 news aggregator. An hour later, the record kicked in and now my river of news has an easy to remember URL and is being dished up from my public Dropbox.
Next up will be the beautification of my river. There’s already a nicer looking format in the wings. Just have to figure out how to replace my current theme with the new one.
Once that piece is in place, I’ll focus my attention on the experience for other River2 users on my EC2 instance. This is going to be important because it’s all about the other users for me. For instance, is mapping a URL for a second River2 user going to be easy or even possible? And what if they want a custom CSS or other tweaks to the display? I’m thinking about keeping it simple and not really allowing many options at first but it’s good to know what options even exist in the first place.
If none of this makes sense, stay with me. As I learn, I’ll continue to post more here and I believe it will all start coming together into something cohesive.
All of these posts about rivers and aggregators and EC2 instances amount to one thing. An easier way to consume RSS feeds. It’s easiest to read your feeds when they flow by like a river. Most RSS readers don’t follow this format. Instead, they shove your feeds into folders and guilt you into reading them by displaying an ‘unread’ items count. I hate that unread count. Rivers of news do not have an unread count.
