Forgive me for not doing a thorough search for prior art, but I noticed this post by Oleg Tkachenko in which he’s in need of a decent server-side aggregation code base.

The reason it caught my attention is that “server-side” is my specialty. That’s where I’ve spent the great majority of my time in my various day jobs. But doing server-side work is like living underground. Every once in a while, you need to get cleaned up, shave, and poke your head aboveground and let humanity see your face. That was partly my motivation in haacking on RSS Bandit. I wanted to get more exposure to working on a “client-side” product. (The other part is that it was such a kick-ass product, I had to get involved.)

Taking the core RSS Bandit “NewsComponents.dll” and slapping it on a server for simple server-side aggregation probably wouldn’t take much work at all. What’s would be more interesting (and a lot more work) is taking it a step further and building a full-featured web-based aggregator.

Using so called “Ajax” techniques (which is really just a repackaging of existing technologies, including Microsoft’s proprietary XMLHttpRequest object and should be called POXSCRIPT for Plain Old Xml and Scripting), I can envision a web-based RSS Bandit that looks and functions quite similarly to the rich client. We could call it “RSS Bandit Web Access” as a nod to “Outlook Web Access”.

Now, the need for such an undertaking is dampened by the fact that RSS Bandit has a very nice synchronization mechanism so that using it from multiple computers isn’t a huge pain. Necessity being the mother of invention, this feature makes it so that I personally don’t see a web-based version as a huge necessity.

The other dampener is that I do have to pay my bills via billable work now. This would be the type of project I’d love to dive into and work on full time. The temptation would probably be too great and I’d neglect so many responsibilities to do so, becoming that underground mole I mentioned earlier. ;)

Anyways, this is just food for thought. How popular would such a package be? How many people have a web-server to install it on?

[Listening to: Intec Jimpy / Talkin (Terrantella Vs Redanka Remix) - Sasha - Global Underground Ibiza CD 1 (7:03)]