Announce an Ounce
Recently I signed up for Pownce, a micro-blogging site. My intent was to use it as a replacement for Google Reader shared items, since it addresses my two main complaints about them:
- Restricted to articles from feeds to which I subscribe
- Cannot include any personal commentary with each link
I tried Pownce out and like it so far, but it has a flaw that totally halted my plans: Pownce RSS feeds only include the bodies of notes posted—not the link URLs! You have to click through each item to see the original entry at Pownce before you can go on to see what’s been shared.
So I spent the last couple nights whipping up a little Rails app that solves this problem with the Pownce API.
It’s called Ounce.
Ounce creates a new RSS feed for any user’s public profile that includes links. That’s all it does! I named it “Ounce” because it seemed like such a tiny app to write—probably the least amount of code of anything I’ve ever released. And of course it rhymes with Pownce. (I originally considered “Ownce,” but it just looked weird to me.)
You can grab my new Pownce feed here. I don’t know how well it will stand up to heavy traffic, but for now it’s also open for anyone to create their own feed.
Commentary
This is great man. Much appreciated. My new feed: http://wattornot.com/ounce/greghuntoon
My question though, is there any way to get an RSS feed for an entire group? That’s the one thing missing…
Do you have any idea? Greg
Glad you like it!
By groups, I assume you mean what Pownce calls sets? So far the API only exposes “public” stuff, which, as far as I can tell, does not include sets.
I guess it could be done by manually entering a list of users, and then having Ounce combine their notes into a single RSS feed. But I don’t really use sets, so this is unlikely to happen. :)
Alternatively, you could try combining several Ounce feeds together with a service like Yahoo Pipes or maybe Tumblr. That’s probably your best bet in the short run.