I like to start my day with a mug of coffee and the news before my first class at 8:00 am. However, when I was reading Digg this morning, I noticed a few changes I had previously missed (when did they change the UI?). The page I looked at had a new look, and it was decided an improvement except for the enormous amount of wasted space. On a whim, I switched over to IE (inside of Firefox of course) to see what exactly Digg was doing.
Thus spawned my idea. There are a lot of things I don't like about Digg. The childish comments, the advertising, and the general atmosphere that is so reminiscent of high school. However, those gripes aside, Digg does have quite a few interesting stories. To avoid those unpleasant elements, I use the RSS feed. However, that only helps me weed out the stories that I don't care about.
What we need is an alternative RSS feed. Something that looks like this (inside of RSSOwl at least):
What it has:
- Article title and summary
- Links directly to article.
- Has a convenient Digg-it button.
- Has links to mirrors inside the feed.
What it doesn't have:
- Submitter name
- Advertising
- Comments
The implementation is pretty straight forward. Could be done with a pretty simple program.
1. Use language's HTTP client to download Digg's main page.
2. Feed downloaded results to an XSLT script. Note that Digg outputs XHTML, so no "cleanup" of their page should be necessary.
3. Have the XSLT output Atom an format document [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)] with a template that matches //div[class='news-summary'] and outputs an <entry> for each.
4. Bonus points: Generate mirror links with a template matching on //div[class='news-body']/h3/a@href to grab the news item's URL