Last week www.beginend.net was launched with the goal of aggregating Pascal and Delphi blogs in a mobile-friendly, secure website with a minimalist UI.
The website is Pascal-Powered: the server is Delphi-compiled DWScript Sample Web server, the server-side page generation and APIs are handled by DWS and an SQLite database, and the client-side is a SmartPascal application compiled on-the-fly to JavaScript by the server.
The basic features are to aggregate blogs, allow voting to surface the more interesting posts, and you can optionally “quiet” a blog you do not like or do not care about.
Registration is required for the last two features, but the registration is as lightweight as possible, with the only requirement being an email address. No login, no passwords, no personal data, you will just get an email with a login link.
The plan is to open-source the whole contraption in the next weeks, as soon as I get time to put final touches and am satisfied there are no obvious security issues or abuse opportunities.
If you find a blog of interest that is not listed on the Feeds page, do not hesitate to suggest it!
I am not sure yet what/if any new features will come next, maybe some way to aggregate Pascal open-source projects changes, maybe some up-time service for blog-owners (get notified when your blog is down/offline, the server already tracks it anyway), maybe something else entirely.
If you have other ideas… shoot away 🙂
Up/downtime notification would be a nice feature! I don’t currently have monitoring for this on my web host, so some sort of indirect notification or reliability indicator would be quite cool.
Great work on this Eric.
@David M. You can use a free service such as http://uptimerobot.com to monitor your web sites and services. It works very well.
Being able to subscribe for email updates for new posts, just like DelphiFeeds, would be handy.
I wish you apply line-wrapping to the right sidebar items, so that I can see the full titles such as the SO questions. Maybe use a smaller font size.
Sorry, ignore my suggestion about using smaller font for the right sidebar, the current font size is good, but people want to see full text of the items, instead of having to guess the missing part or go to the target website to read it.