Every morning as part of my ‘get started’ routine, I check most of the OpenSim websites, plus technorati and google searches for OpenSim news. I like to keep informed as to what is being developed, and who is putting OpenSim into production. The problem is it takes a good 15-30 minutes to trawl everywhere.

RSS is the obvious solution – unfortunately every single RSS reader for Windows seems to be stuck with an identical UI – a UI based on Outlook’s terrible RSS reader, which I happen to think makes every attempt at making casual reading as disinteresting as possible. In short, they all suck.

I have a iMac on my desk for testing – and on there I have installed Times. Times is an attempt to make a virtual newspaper built from RSS content – for the most part it works pretty well, but has a few really big drawbacks – it requires OSX (which I rarely boot into for normal use), it’s also uses way too much eye candy – viewing a single post gets half of the text area obscured with a silly ‘bent page’ effect.

Microsoft apparently made a similar application called Codename: Max – unfortunately it was discontinued somewhere after WinXP SP2, and is no longer installable on any system (trust me, I tried). So for the last few weeks I’ve given up and just keep searching manually – until this morning when I decided I’d built my own.

Wordpress has some pretty nifty ‘magazine’ themes, which do automatic translation of blog content into a newspaper-style viewing. Combining this with WP-o-Matic which turns RSS feeds into posts automatically; I have a pretty cool setup going. It took about 3 hours to install and customise (I ended up adapting the ‘Magazine-Basic’ theme with the TTF Titles plugin and stripping out a lot of the navigation) – and then I inserted all the feeds from Planet OpenSim, Technorati, etc.

Overall it works pretty well – I have it configured to load all the OpenSim news, and it shows up in a nice chronological listing (screenshot above is scrolled back about 30 pages into late January). The layout is fairly consistent and easy to look at and being Wordpress & PHP, pretty easy to customise further.