June 2011 Archives

Kindle news aggregator

Reading news on the Kindle is very convenient, so long as you don't have to do it through the web browser.

I had tried Instapaper, and that's OK for individual pages, and then I tried Kindlefeeder, which is OK for RSS and Atom feeds. But I wasn't happy with the delivery format of Kindlefeeder, or with the other limitations of both services, and I thought "it can't be that hard to write an aggregator that combines features of both, can it?"

It turns out that it's not that hard at all, in particular thanks to the Perl modules XML::Feed and HTML::ExtractMain.

Here is the beta version of what I've temporarily called KRAG - Kindle RSS AGgregator.
KRAG is a system which takes your favourite news feeds and sends daily updates from them directly to your Kindle. For example, it can collect all of the previous day's updates from news sites, webcomics, and so on, and send them to your Kindle in time for your morning commute.

Where this differs from other, similar, services is that KRAG puts all of the updates into "periodical" or "magazine" format, with a section for each updated feed. You can then view older updates using the Kindle's "view back issues" feature.

Depending on the settings you choose for each feed you add, KRAG can also follow each entry's link to get the full story, and include that in the update. This means that for feeds taken from news web sites, you get the full story delivered, rather than just a brief summary.

Be gentle with it. I might open-source it at some point; at the moment it is a bit hacked-together.

Publishment

I wrote a short story for K one day (well, over two nights), put it on my Kindle and read it to her. Then I procrastinated for a couple of months about adding pictures, but finally decided that any pictures are better than none, and just got on with it.

She's enjoyed it and asks for it again from time to time, so it's done its job.

Since this is the age of THE INTERNET, I thought why not publish it. Last night I took the plunge and published it through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Even though the KDP dashboard says it's still publishing, it turned up on the Kindle Store earlier today: The Story of Ida Know eBook. It's a bit scary to put my own name into the Amazon eBook search box and find something I made within the first 10 results - it feels rather like I have stuck my neck out a lot.

As of this moment I've sold 1 whole unit that wasn't delivered to my own house. If I can get all the way to 24, I can say "dozens of people have read my book".

If you've got a child aged somewhere between 4 and 8, they might like it, so why not help me get to dizzy double dozen heights and stump up the 86p for my book. (I get something like 26p of that). Even if you have no Kindle, there's a reader app for iPad, iPhone / iPod Touch, Android, and PC.

Update: Now also selling over here on Lulu.com in paperback format.