News Fishing – Stumblish Way of Browsing the Latest
October 11th, 2009 | by Ozgur Cem Sen |Since I introduced myself to Google AppEngine, I’ve always liked it. It’s truly a joy to develop on the AppEngine platform. Due to hectic work schedule, I wasn’t able to get my head around to thinking of a new toy project so I could get into AppEngine again. Well, this weekend I decided to take a break from work-work and build something on the side for a change.
When I was working on the NewsXperiment project, I was neck deep in the RSS/Atom feed world. All the news feed sources that I had accumulated for NewsXperiment was hanging around to be used for another purpose. So came “News Fishing“.
I needed a way to quickly peek at what’s happening “right now” without being lost in a jungle of “stuff” on a web page or in an RSS reader app. I wanted to see “one” news item at a time, and if my interest in intrigued I wanted to dig in more by clicking on the link to the original page. If not, keep fishing. That was my initial and only requirement and it turned out to be the premise of “News Fishing“.
On the techie – geeky side of things, News Fishing uses quite large set of features that are provided by the Google AppEngine platform; Crons Jobs, Task Queues, Memcache etc. I opted on using YUI 3.0 as the javascript library of choice on the frontend.
- As I’m typing this, two mobile apps (for iPhone and Android phones) for News Fishing are in the works.
