X111.com

Here we go, tracking 73 sites, and more to be added as I go, my own news site:
http://X111.org
I’m still on the lookout for some more proper sites for some of the categories, especially Computer, Music & Pro Blogging. And I still have to add a Gaming category if someone can come up with some decent non-hawker links.

Adding sites to the mix is more precarious job than I figured. The problem is volume. Some news sites (take ArsTechnica for example) produce so many items per day that if you add them to a category they’ll drown out all the other sites.
So it’s a bit of a delicate mix I’m still working on to find the right balance, as my idea is to be able to take a peak once per day or per two/three days to stay in the loop of what’s going on on the internet.

Technical info; I started looking for a backend news aggregator and ultimately decided on Gregarius seeing as it’s been around for a while, is still maintained, and has all the features I was looking for.
So I installed it and played with it a bit, added some rss feeds and was content. Then I had to figure out how to make the frontend work the way I want. After looking into Gregarius’ code for a while, and seeing how the themes worked I gave up on the idea of modding it to suit my purpose. Instead I wrote the whole thing from scratch using nothing more than an afternoon’s worth of PHP, querying the MySQL database that stores Gregarius’ data.