Using someone else to read for you

Time is limited and that makes me try to optimize it as much as possible. There is quite a lot of blogs that I'm subscribed to and that I would like to have the time to read, even more all of those blogs or webpages contains valuable references or hyper links that I'd love to read as well.

What I really hate is have to go through all of them looking for the topics that I like, really I don't have the time, and posts and more posts goes into the cruel destiny of never-read land. Because of that reason, since some time ago I keep some "readers" on my machine, they're basically some processes that examine my preferred webs, starting the search with my Reader subscriptions and then sneaking into the first level links from them.

So basically the parent process is looking for new information in my social circle that talk about my interests.

As an example the first version of the script was doing something like:

for i in $(cat google-reader-subscriptions.xml | grep xmlUrl | sed 's/^.*xmlUrl="//g' | sed 's/".*$//g'); do echo "Checking website: " $i; curl -s $i | grep "Alicante" ; done

Then the future version include a handy mail notification as soon as my preferred news appear, or any link from my web social circle talk about it.

Oops dinner is ready, lets keep my readers doing the job, I'll see later what they have to say... ;-)

Image from: http://www.rdpl.org