A project to get lots of feeds into a database.
There are three types of nodes in our graph:
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users
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feeds
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subscriptions
The relationships we manage: users subscribe to feeds.
A user can enter subscriptions in two ways.
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Upload an OPML subscription list.
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When browsing, click a button to subscribe or unsubscribe.
You can upload as many OPML subscription lists as you like.
We maintain a single public OPML subscription list for each user which reflects all the feeds they are currently subscribed to. This list can be accessed by feed reading software, so it's possible that feedBase can be a place to manage subscriptions you want to share with many feed-reading services
The home page of the site is the top 100 list of feeds ranked by the number of subscribers.
You can click on a feed to see a page with information about the feed, and a list of users who subscribe to it.
You can click on a name of a user to see the feeds they subscribe to. And on and on.
Periodically we read the feeds to keep our database of info about them up to date.
There's a command that lets you see all the feeds you're subscribed to. And a command that lets you delete all your subscriptions to start over.
The world of news and blogs needs glue.
I'm ready to do it, it seems. I did a project late last year to learn how MySQL works in server apps written in Node, and this was a simple evolution of what I already had working. We also have feed reading down in Node, and lots of tools, etc. So it's a good time to try to create some community glue. ;-)
The database software is open source so if other communities want to run their own feedBases, you're welcome to. It requires a MySQL database and a bit of configuration.
RSS and OPML are a strong foundation, widely supported. And as they say, really simple.
My name is Dave Winer.
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Groundrules -- what you need to know about privacy and how feedBase works.
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Database structure -- docs for the feeds and subscriptions tables.