I've made a bunch of updates to my Big 12 Sports river the past couple of weeks. Originally I was relying on my RSS reader to fetch and display all the feeds. Now I've written my own software to do that, so I have more control over the final product. There were several things I didn't like about the RSS-reader's version:
- It showed duplicate stories. If the Tulsa World had an article mentioning OU and OSU, it appeared twice, once under each school's feed.
- The length of each story varied wildly. Some had a short summary while others displayed the entire text of the article.
- The images were inconsistent. Some stories had images, some didn't. Sometimes the images were so large they ran into the story below them.
I was able to fix all of that by creating my own river. You can take a look at it here:
I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Duplicates are gone; images are gone; and all the stories are roughly the same size. And in case you're curious, it updates every hour. I can't take credit for the design, however. A handful of others created a "Beautiful River" design that I incorporated, with a few tweaks.
A few months ago I picked up a programming book called "Taming Text", which is all about analyzing and manipulating text documents. It gave me several grand ideas of features to try out, which is part of what inspired me to create the river in the first place. I've put those ideas on hold for now, though. They would be a lot of work to implement, and it's already been a lot of work just to get to this point.
As an example, I could apply classification algorithms to each story to determine what sport it covered. Then there could be tabs at the top of the river to switch between each sport. That would be useful when basketball season is in full swing, so you could easily see the football stories at a glance. Another grand idea is to automatically extract people's names from a story and display them as metadata under each link in the river. You could see who was mentioned in each story at a glance. I'm not sure how useful that would be, but it could be a fun learning exercise at the very least.
But those ideas are for a later day. In the meantime, I'll see how my current river works out.