Sorry I was unable to post for a while. I wasn’t busy, but wrote a bunch of drafts and decided I wouldn’t publish them.

I shouted to the Internet that I am unhappy with existing RSS readers. Now, let’s use our prediction skills to see what will happen next.

Hmm… Programmers like to solve problems. I appear to have a problem with RSS readers. The title also gives a hint that I’m making plans for an RSS reader. Considering all that evidence, it is pretty likely that I’m going to make an RSS reader, right?

Yup. You guessed correctly. I’m going to build an RSS reader.

Because I want to access my RSS reader from anywhere, I will be creating a web RSS reader.

Below is the list of features that I have planned for the RSS reader.

• Tagging of feeds as well as individual posts.
• A recommendation engine for posts.
• Integration with:
  • Google Reader
  • FriendFeed
  • Delicious
  • and possibly more
• The ability to experiment with possibly dozens of user interfaces.

Wait, “experiment with possibly dozens of user interfaces”? Now why would I want to do that? The main reason that I want to experiment with a large amount of user interfaces is because no user interface for an RSS reader (both desktop and web-based) have ever satisfied my need for large amounts of data to come down the pipeline and be displayed in a good looking manner.

I am also interested in getting feedback from users to see which user interface is the most easy to use.

Now all I have to decide is what language to write it in. I’m thinking of either writing it in PHP or Python. I’m leaning towards PHP, as I haven’t actually done any real web programming in Python. I might try Ruby on Rails, as I know a small amount of Ruby.

Because of my limited resources, my RSS reader would be restricted to private alpha, though making the RSS reader open source would allow other folks to try it out on their own servers.

Any comments and suggestions on my RSS reader? Comment below.