Site review

Fellow geeks-

Please check out:

http://rss.lstech.org

This is an RSS feed aggregrator I built that has features too numerous to mention. Basically, what it does is:

* Allow folks that manage legal aid websites to create custom RSS feeds with legal aid specific meta-data that tags along with them. (This meta-data describes stuff that the core RSS standards miss when it comes to our needs.)

* The general public (or at least those that are interested in legal aid news) can come to the site and either use a feed as-is from a provider, or create thier own custom feed via our "user-defined" system, which uses a full-text index (with boolean search capabilities) and selected meta-data. Part of the index is also the stuff at the end of an RSS item- items that are in our system are "spidered" to increase the capabilities of the full-text index.

Part of the thing that got me excited to do this system is the fact that more and more email clients support RSS feeds- and creating systems that allow users to specify what they want for news is VERY cool to me.

I did everything, including coming up with the idea. It's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional (View source. . .you can actually read it!) with some minor concessions made for netscape 4.x users.

It's built with mod_perl, CGI::Application, HTML::Template, DBIx::FullTextSearch, CGI::Session, and the "friendly" urls to actual feeds are done with mod_rewrite.

It's currently running on a PII-233. Given the very granular caching I've implemented, I've clocked it at a theoretical 8 feeds per second. Assuming it'd top out at half of that, it's capable of creating 400,000 feeds a day. Gotta love mod_perl!

This system is going to be VERY cool when I have more legal aid CMS's feeding into it. . . Overall, it's probably 95% complete, there just needs to be some minor content development done and I need to get the other CMS's to create feeds.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any design or functionality suggestions. The target audience currently is a HIGHLY technical crowd- developers or techie managers that can create and use news feeds.