Recently I’ve been playing with our stream output and messing with different publishing models, like injecting it into blog posts directly. These were mostly just experiments to get a feel for different ways of displaying Grazr content aside from our traditional “super-widget” view.
I stumbled across this service feedvolley that basically takes feeds and turns them into nicely formatted web pages (most of the themes are modeled after Tumblr). This isn’t something that’s hard to do with code, but feedvolley makes it quick and easy to play around with generating sites, and the addition of themes is nice. Here’s my “Apple News” stream in feedvolley.
It may seem counterintuitive to turn feeds into pages, but feeds can be difficult for people to understand and pages are an accessible type of content for most. It becomes especially interesting when you think of processed or filtered feeds, feeds that have no direct analog back to a particular web page. A clear example would be our streams, the amalgamation of lots of different sources.
It’s interesting to get a feel for what these new pages are like. They are something new with different purpose than their original sources.
I know Twitter’s been having problems, but lately we’ve been hoping to build some twitter services. Unfortunately due to their issues, we’ve been denied access to the twitter jabber stream we were hoping to build on. In the interim I’ve been playing with Summize, it’s a pretty nice search engine for Twitter. They return data in a few formats, so I’m playing with their JSON return seeing what I can get out of it. Here’s showing a search for various political terms including the DNC, Obama, Hilary, McCain and a few others.
It’s nice to have a new blog where I can throw together little experiments. I just changed my stream integrator around a bit so I thought I’d test it again. One of my streams is “Apple News”, so this list should be an up to the hour river-of-news, updated from my favorite Apple news sources.
We’ve tried focusing on our feed streams lately at Grazr (it’s the main focus of our homepage) and at the same time we’ve been playing with some alternate publishing / integration methods. This list of links should dynamically update as the sources in our a-list stream mention twitter along with scaling. Here’s what the A-list is saying:
Michael Kowalchik (mikepk) is the CTO and co-founder of 