Feeding the beast — making a news hub

I’ve been experimenting with and reading up on the idea of embedding news and info from other sources into a site (not necessarily this one, but a site in general). The idea is that I could make a mini Google News of sorts by pulling in links to specific content.

I’m able to do that thanks to Yahoo News, which not only lets you search the world’s news based on keywords, but also lets you save those searches as RSS feeds — the same technology that makes it easy to read blogs.

Another nifty piece of software is the venerable Magpie RSS. If you own your Web site (i.e., if you can edit the code directly), you can use Magpie RSS to scoop up any RSS feed and insert it into your page.

So instead of a blogroll, for example, I could have a blogroll with links to each blog’s latest entries. In this case, though, I simply searched for “roanoke” on Yahoo news and saved the result as an RSS feed, then used Magpie to insert it into my site.

I then did the same thing with Google News (which also allows you to save keyword searches as feeds), and then Technorati, which lets you see what bloggers are saying about something.

End result is a proof-of-concept page I created that’s a one-stop shop for news about, in this case, Roanoke.

Now, what to do with this, I’m not sure. But I like the idea of creating a site about something and being able to populate it with links to more content. Hmm.