As part of the ongoing improvements to confoozled.com, I have now added news pages to each of the site categories: disabilities, digital art & technology, music, computers & technology, and pets. Stories are hand-picked by me, and will be updated at least once a day, unless I am away from my computer for any reason.
This is part of my efforts to keep the site fresh, with constantly updated content, without my having to put too much work into it (because we've all seen what happens - the site doesn't get updated for a year). I've come up with a way to make updating these news pages a fairly automated part of my daily news-reading ritual, something I would be doing every day anyway.
For those interested in the technical side, here's how I did it.
I started by setting up a Google News search for each of the site topics. I saved the RSS feed for each of these searches to my newsreader of choice (in this case, Google Reader, but it doesn't really matter). Each day as I'm reading the stories in these feeds, I select the ones I want to publish to confoozled.com and post them to my del.icio.us account using their Firefox extension, and tagging them with the appropriate topic. Each tag on my del.icio.us account generates its own RSS feed, which is read by a Perl script on my server at three specific times each day, and converted into the HTML you see on the finished pages.
This way, rather than manually logging in and editing the pages myself, which I would quickly grow tired of and stop doing, all it takes to post a story is the click of a couple of buttons.
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