Flutterby™! : Syndication and clever hacks

Scoble has been fanning the syndicator flames of late, and offers some reasons he thinks RSS is better than HTML (actually why he thinks syndicators are better than browsers, but we'll leave his syntax intact). Many of his reasons are based on using a horrid previous generation browser like IE that don't have tabbed browsing or "open every link in this bookmark folder", or that he reads sites with crappy web design ("don't do that, then"), but the one that struck a nerve is that syndicators only show you updated pages. I probably spend a few seconds per site seeing that it didn't update, and that's a few seconds we could probably save, and then there's a whole bunch of sites that are unfairly relegated to "Sporadic" or elevated to "Daily" that could just find their own place.

Well, a quick opera --help showed me that one can do opera -backgroundpage url to open a page in a new tab in the background. A few lines of Perl parsed my Opera bookmarks file, checked to see if the URL had a changed last-modified date or content length, and slapped up a new tab if it couldn't tell that things hadn't changed.

(Oh yeah, I should probably tie this into my last updated dates down there on the right somehow, 'cause the whole Weblogs.com really isn't working very well.)

This is totally not ready for prime-time, but if you're an Opera and Perl user (or other tabbed browser user willing to do a little coding) who'd like to help turn this into a real app, gimme a yelp.