The personal portal

My morning routine before leaving for work goes a little something like this:

Get up & dressed
Wash
Watch BBC Breakfast to see if aliens have landed
Check the web for Underground news (London Underground)
Check the weather (the BBC)
Quickly scan mail to see if anything needs a reply before I leave (Gmail) Items 1 through 3 are just about as fine tuned as they get. Items 3-6 all involve looking at several different websites. None of them gets anything more than a passing glance, and it occurred to me that I could do with rolling them up into a single, very personal, portal. News from the BBC can be pulled in using RSS, and there are plenty of RSS weather feeds out there. Gmail would require getting hold of an API (there are plenty out there) and the tube news could be gotten using a screen scape. Then all there is to do is pull this together into a single CGI page (or more likely a Movable Type page) and password protect it. That said, it all seems like a lot of work – another for my endless slack list I think.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2004 at 10:03 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “The personal portal”

1. On October 1, 2004 at 10:51 pm David Flett wrote:

For the tube info maybe a screenscrape to RSS feed for sites that don’t have one. I haven’t tested it but was looking for something else and saw it on my way through:

http://evanjones.ca/software/index.html

No idea if there are other tools out there to do it?

2. On October 5, 2004 at 8:36 pm Mike Hill wrote:

For daily tube news, you can get free txt and/or email alerts to your mobile – see http://alerts.tfl.gov.uk/

3. On October 6, 2004 at 1:33 pm portly wrote:

Goddammit !!!!! This is just another cheap opportunity for you to point out that you’re on GMail and I’m not :(

4. On October 6, 2004 at 2:26 pm Sam Newman wrote:

Invite coming your way Ian :-)

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