Agro the Aggregator is my experimental proof of concept
syndication client. Basically I'm not happy with the web based aggregators currently available, and Agro lets me
experiment with various ideas I have for improving them. (Note that this was 3 or 4 days of after work hacking,
so don't expect the world…)
In particular, I'm interested in using textual analysis to help the user find the information
that interests them as quickly as possible.
I'm also interested in using some of the modern web-as-a-platform webservices to proactivly
gather and present related information to the user.
Currently, Agro uses Classifier4J to allow the user to filter sites by topic (currently
limited to “Java programming” and “US Politics”). It also uses Classifier4J to extract keywords
for each item, and them some AJAX techniques (using DWR) to retrieve related news from Yahoo.
Agro the Aggregator is ugly in all browsers (I hate CSS), but works best in Firefox (actually I haven't
bothered to look at it in IE).
Some of the software used to build Agro the Aggregator includes:
Agro currently aggregates the following sites (click the link to see the aggregated view):