KindleFeeds, an RSS reader Andrew and I wrote

Check out Kindle Feeds, a cool little app Andrew and I wrote. It lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, and generates a kindle-compliant “book” that you can download on to your kindle. The book has a table of contents and a nice link at the top which will fetch a new version of the book with only new posts. It’s really quite easy and you can update anywhere you have cell phone coverage.


In case you’re wondering here’s a bit of background:

A while back, Andrew wrote this cool application in python that let you store static HTML pages from the web into kindle docs that you could then download at will. (The old version of this was called Bibliorize and still lives up on www.bibliorize.com. But I’m gonna merge the two this week sometime and maybe find a new home for it somewhere.)

This seemed awesome, but had a few drawbacks; the main one that you had to manually add each page you wanted to read. That’s a lot of work for a lazy person like me, and not so useful when most of the things I read come from RSS(/atom/whatever) feeds. So, before a recent flight to SF, it dawned on me that the solution was to expand Andrew’s app to allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds. Also, this app needed to be able to automatically update nicely, so that no feeds were repeated. Updating OTA was cool, of course. I wanted to remove the need for users to log in on their Kindle, a painstaking and error-prone process. So I spent the six or so hours coding (coding without access to the Internet is surprisingly difficult!). And with a few more hours later, I think this app does all that!

There are a lot of bugs and things to improve though, not the least of which is the hideous colour scheme. We also need to pretty up the handling of dates and make the table of contents a bit more usable. Also we have to settle on a name for it.

Stay tuned!!


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