Are you a programmer or website developer? If so I need some help and I am willing to pay for that help. I have a desire to add some features to this site. If you have ever visited www.newsisfree.com you can subscribe and view your hand picked news sources RSS/XML feeds etc in a very organized browser friendly way. We want to do something similar to what they are doing at www.newsisfree.com but on a much smaller scale and not with all the bells and whistles. I also want to integrate that data into our post so you will also need to have a clue how MovableType works which we use to publish this site.
I have been playing around with Drupal and we have been attempting to highlight some of the sites that I use to gather news from so that you can go directly to the source of the news feeds we scour. You can view our test feeds here. I am absolutely not happy with it. I am due to upgrade Drupal to the current release which fixes some of the RSS problems but those that develop for Drupal have a very narrow view on how it could be improved into a world class news aggreator. Attempting to get them to improve it has not been successful. Drupal currently is not the perfect solution. Very few people have a clue on how to modify or design a new Drupal skin to match our theme. I have had a standing offer to pay for a skin design and have had very little real response to that request. The RSS news aggreator publisher is not suited to do 500+ news sources.
This site runs on a Unix flavored box, the few developers that I have been in contact with said they could program us a ASP solution. Well I want something that will work across Windows and Unix boxes so you will have to know perl. So if you are up to the challenge visit www.newsisfree.com and see how they have that site laid out and how it basically works and then send me a e-mail with your qualifications and a voice contact number and I will explain in detail what I have in mind. I think my idea is radical/advanced enough that I am willing to give away my idea to someone which they could develop and commercially sell. I believe the tool would result in substantial revenue by selling the enhancement it to other Movable-Type users. If you do not want to risk it I will pay for it and then sell it.
With Six Apart supposedly moving forward on the commercial version of MT which I am not holding my breath for as they have been damn slow and unresponsive to those of us holding out for the improvements there should be a huge market for the tool.
I’m not sure we’ve done exactly what you require, but we may be close. Our platform currently can aggregate, persist, and present, or simply aggregate and transform.
Take a look at , paying specific attention to all the aggregations of weblogs on the left nav panel. Then give me a ring at 970-262-9181. I’ll walk you through some exercises that will demonstrate an aggregation capability that may be useful to your requirements.
–bf