Feedwatching

About Feedwatching: The WINGMEN concept is simple: Stop reading, start looking !. So instead of displaying dozens of RSS titles it only extracts and displays the images of those, letting the user choose which RSS to read (or not) according to how much he's attracted by a particular image. Client's requirements: The client asked for an implementation of the WINGMEN graphical concept, the extraction of data from the RSS feeds enlisted by the site's visitors, the management of this data, the administration of the entire website, the scheduled RSS feed update process, performance and scalability. Client: Wingmen Unlimited b.v., The Netherlands

New stuff and improvements:

Technical consulting:
The portal is the materialization of Mark van Rossem's ingenious idea, which he turned to life with our help. His concept was simple: to offer a new way of navigation through RSS feeds using each feed's extracted images as a starting point. So instead of reading countless RSS text titles the user chooses to read a feed according to how attractive the images are in that particular feed. Analyzing the client's needs we built a custom architectured system based on three levels:

• The data aquisition process, RSS parsing and images extraction. The extracted images, saved in a custom database, become links to articles on the various websites
• The system's administration interface and its functions
• The public frontend, available to the visitors

Web Programming:
The client already had most of the needed graphic layouts, saved as PSD files so the first step was to convert these layouts into HTML/CSS source code and build the necessary javascript animations. The resulted HTML pages were verified and validated, very carefully and thoroughly, by the client itself.

The dynamic RSS extraction process:
The second phase of the project started by implementing the necessary functions to extract the RSS feeds from various sites, parsing the articles, saving the necessary data into a MySQL database, running an automated process on the extracted images and finally saving the images on the server's hard drives to be used as visual reference elements.

It is, perhaps, one of the projects we liked most and we are truly proud and honoured to be a part of it. We are currently working on the 2nd version of this project which will bring new various and interesting improvements

Technologies: RubyOnRails, MySQL, Html/CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, JQuery.

Link: www.feedwatching.com