jmtd → log → meta → Newsdot

A long time ago, Tom stuck together some neato-code which determined when a website was updated using clever methods, and aggregated a bunch of sites together into a table. We used this for our little social-circle's personal web sites.

Nowerdays you'd say 'pffft, blogging, RSS, newsreaders' but none of these terms were around back then. Well, they are now, and with the help of planetplanet, we've got a similar thing running now.

Ladies and gentlemen may I announce http://news.alkali.org/, which is (probably) version 3.0., or thereabouts. Design just knocked together this evening, needs a bit of touching up for IE.

(closing note: the technique tom used is now referred to as 'screen scraping', and looked down apon. I had to hack planetplanet a bit: it rejects an entire feed if a single entry is more than 2 years old (an arbitrary sanity check). This dropped Jon Rimmer's blog. here's the patch I wrote to fix that).