« Introducing my iTalk Microphone | Main | Introducing Tsunami-Info.org »
January 1, 2005
Aggregating Tsunami-Related News and Blogs
A couple days ago I created a Kinja digest of news feeds and blogs from tsunami survivors. It was a good idea, but I was never comfortable with the site's advertisements and overall design. To complicate matters, since I shared the login and password so other bloggers could add their own tsunami-related feeds, someone decided to change the password and lock others out. Not very bloggerly if you ask me.
Because of this, I started to experiment with my own aggregator located here on my blog. I've even bought the domain name Tsunami-Info.org, which, surprisingly, was still available on New Year's Eve. The URL isn't up and running yet, but I'll let you know when it's ready.
As you'll see if you look at the page, it's pretty rudimentary, as my coding skills are very, very weak -- so weak I simply tweaked the template for my blog, which certainly isn't very original. But functionally speaking, I've managed to get my blog software to work with a couple of rss-related plugins to pull together what I have so far.
Essentially, it's a collection of the five most recent posts from a dozen or so news feeds and blogs, including Yahoo!/Reuters, the BBC, South-East Asia and Tsunami Blog (SEA EAT), Crossroads Dispatches and Emergency Action Blog. The most poignant feed comes from SEA EAT's Flickr feed: a stream of photos and descriptions of people still missing from the tsunami. It sends chills up my spine every time I see them.
Anyway, it's a start; hopefully the new URL will be ready before the end of the weekend. I'd love to know what people think....
Posted by acarvin at January 1, 2005 10:04 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
