(no subject)

[arethinn]

Has anyone found an iGoogle substitute that works on the same widget/gadget model? I tried Netvibes and Protopage and both of them seem to just expect me to fill in a single rss feed into each of a whole bunch of boxes on a page, so I can... I guess read a bunch of news feeds (though most of mine are not actually "news") individually side by side? Is that what they expect me to want to be doing? I have an rss reader (The Old Reader); I don't need to use a dashboard page that way.

I haven't yet tried igHome, which seems to operate more like what I have in mind, though I imagine the selection of widgets will be limited. Nor have I looked back at My Yahoo since... like... a silly "Web 2.0" project I had to do for work back in 2007. Maybe I should.

Going on a tangent: does anyone know how to construct the feed url for Flickr's "Interesting" photos? http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/ and http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/docs/photos_public/ don't give me enough information to work it out, probably because there's background knowledge they're expecting me to have that I don't have. ("interesting" photos don't seem to be tagged "interesting" or "explored" or whatever unless a user applies the tag.)

Comments

[elf]

I've been happy with NetVibes. I imported my g'reader feeds before it died, and it's been working fine for me. The top-right corner has a toggle between "widgets view" and "reader view;" the reader view seems similar to what I had with Google Reader.

I have had troubles adding new feeds; every time I want to do so, I have to poke around a dozen buttons and figure out where they've hidden that part. Maybe it's intuitive to people who work with apps.

[arethinn]

That's just not what I want to do with it, though. I have a gazillion feeds that I read through a dedicated RSS reader, as I said. The functionality I am trying to replace looks like this:



The DeviantArt, Flickr, and APOD (*sniff*, no NASA right now) ones are built on RSS feeds, to be sure, but the dA and Flickr ones are more complex than just giving a window into a feed.

(I can, or could, subscribe to APOD directly by rss, but I liked this gadget because it gave me bigger thumbnails. The dA Popular feed is drinking from a firehose; I like the way this gadget just gives me a quick glimpse of new popular things when I start up each day. And as I mentioned in the post, I can't seem to figure out the flickr Interesting feed, which would probably similarly be a firehose - and this gadget does other things, like cycling the thumbnails in a slideshow-like format.)

The two on the left are not based off feeds in a standard way, as far as I can tell. There's some API stuff going on there, I imagine.