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The next generation RSS reader concept

The problem

Today, almost all websites have some sort of an RSS feed to keep you updated of their latest news.
On the other hand, users may be overloaded by all sorts of irrelevant information that arise from this trend.

The other part of the problem would be a magazine website with multiple areas of interest.
Such a magazine would report hardware as well as software news, Apple as well as Android information, etc.

But what if we are only interested in part of the information provided by RSS?


The solution

Some of the newest RSS readers started to address the issue by providing filtering options that can be used to filter out words, authors, categories or tags that do not interest you.

Their biggest disadvantage is their learning curve. You need to mark each and every part of each post for tags, authors, categories and words that makes that single post irrelevant to you.

jReader tries to address this problem by:

  • employing an intelligent algorithms that automatically scans tags, categories, authors and titles of each post for repeating patterns
  • allowing users to mark a full posting as irrelevant (this is where the algorithm kicks in)
  • at the same time, allowing users to mark parts of the post that are always irrelevant (like a category, author or a tag)

The technology

jReader's ideology comes from the simple fact that everything has already been invented.
It would be a waste of time trying to reinvent the wheel, when we have these technologies coming to help:

  • Google Feed API, a service which can:
    • read just about any RSS data and generate a valid output from them
    • when possible, serves a cached RSS data via a CDN network - making feed delivery lightning fast
  • Yahoo! Pipes, serving as a backup solution in cases when:
    • Google Feed API does not recognize the feed in question
    • user tries to add a website URL instead of RSS feed address (our Yahoo! Pipe can extract feed URL from a website)
    • Google doesn't like the device requesting RSS feed :P
  • PHP SimpleXML, serving as a replacement of both services mentioned above, when:
    • none of those services can fetch the feed in question
    • there is a cached merge-copy of all the latest articles from all user's RSS feeds
  • jQuery JavaScript library, providing an excellent base for:
    • display of feeds data directly on user's device from above-mentioned sources
    • a jQuery Mobile framework used to deliver jReader experience to various mobile platforms
  • MySQL database backend, storing:
    • usernames and emails of all "registered" users
    • basic information about user's predefined feeds and all posts
  • flat-file storage, used to:
    • store copies of posts, so their snippets can be displayed without putting additional strain to the Google / Yahoo! APIs or the RSS feed itself
Posted by Martin Ambruš 2012-08-25

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