Same sh1t different shape

Building my own minimal way to check the same few sites, because no feed reader was simple enough.

Middle of last week I noticed that on 3 or 4 occasions during the day i would hit the same 5 or 6 sites and see if there was any updated content for me to look at.

Now at this point most people would respond “Dude, use a Feed Reader and just subscribe to their RSS Feeds”.

But as usual with me, that just doesn’t seem to work for a few reasons:

1. I have yet to find a Reader that is simple, and minimal in what it offers, I just want to see what’s what and move one, this is a 10 second task at tops
2. On the subject of speed, I also don’t want to have to login to something, or run it in a local application, I just want to see the information “easily”
3. I want to be able to see that information on any computer, including my Windows Mobile Phone.

So armed with an old URL that I brought on a whim, an open source PHP RSS reader and about 3 hours of my evenings and weekends I produced the rather aptly named Same Shit Different Shape.

This is ‘my’ feed reader. I included the 4-5 feeds that I want to track, I then found myself getting ambitious and adding feeds that I only wish I could check, but never did. Then I rediscovered dapper and went crazy converting some of the sites that I wish had feeds into dapper feeds (funnily some had already been converted for me).

[An image here did not survive.]

Later on I tweaked it so I could include some useful delicious feeds, and then just for fun I rendered out a few feeds from some site galleries so I had some nice visuals.

Later I came across an old url that I’d first seen maybe 6 months ago, and the similarities where only slightly very clear, but the reason that SSDS isn’t just a popUrls clone is that it’s mine.. all mine. Popurls shows content that although very similar is not the exact content I want to see, and I can’t decide to dump and feed tomorrow, or add a new one for no reason.

Then it dawned on me, I haven’t built something on the web that was for me for a long long time. So I’m starting again. I’m doing a series of tiny simple projects that are just stuff that I will find interesting or useful. Hopefully my interest and passion for what I build will also make them of interest to others, but if it doesn’t, that’s OK, because it’s for me. Maybe some of them will grow and I’ll find myself wanting to listen to what others would like…and that will be fine, and very nice, but it’s not the initial aim.

So keep your eyes open for 2 sites that focus on sharing designs and photo’s, one site on personal discovery and a couple of other things that I just have no idea about yet. More news will be posted here when I have it.

In the meantime, please feel free to check out same shit different shape, I hope it’s of interest to others, but please don’t be upset if it changes or gets bigger for no apparent reason - it’s just me trying to please the worse customer in the world….me.

First published on jpsykes.com.