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Ask HN: Would you use a good RSS rewinder?

3 points by adrih ↗ HN
I needed something that could replay blogs from the beginning. I thought of doing it quick and dirty, that is parse the HTML of the blogs I want to replay by hand.

But then I realized that there is a more general problem about blogs, podcasts, etc. to be solved; that is how do you make a machine understand the chronology of the posts, file them by categories, tags, etc.? The HTML structure is different for every blog, so I could build a general-purpose web service which would turn any blog into an xml file ready for consumption by a machine.

Right now I don't see good uses for it apart from RSS replay but let me know if you are interested/have ideas about this.

By the way I plan on implementing this using something similar to Opera's fast forward button and then walking up the posts. Shouldn't be too difficult.

2 comments

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nudge
I had the same idea - you should do it! There are some fantastic blogs out there with amazing content that are totally overwhelming because you're coming at it after years of writing, so if you could rewind the RSS (great way of describing it by the way), that would be really fantastic.

Don't worry about tags so much, but you need the dates, because your user should be able to play back the RSS at a speed greater than the speed the posts were actually written (so that they have a hope of catching up one day).

If you need to do it from the html, you could use something like beautiful soup - it would be able to gather the date, I'm sure.

pbjorklund
This is a feature I have been looking for in google reader for ages. It's especially useful for web-comics. I sure would use it if you made it.