yelvington.com

About a month ago, we quietly added a personalized page feature to BlufftonToday.com.

Personalization has been around for quite awhile -- it dates back to March 1995, when Jeff Boulter announced CRAYON (named for "CReAte Your Own Newspaper"). Newspapers haven't done much with it, but just about every portal and search engine has a my.sitename.com feature.

We've wondering whether a "my page" tool could contribute anything significant to frequency-of-use numbers, and there's no way to know without trying it, so we did.

It's too early to tell one way or another, but we're going to bundle this tool into the blogging/social networking package we're rolling out to all Morris newspapers.

And as of this afternoon we're releasing the software under the open-source General Public License.

Called Mysite, it's a module for the Drupal content management system. Ken Rickard, who is part of our Strategy and Innovation team, wrote it (fairly quickly) and has uploaded it to Drupal.org. A tarball should be available tonight or tomorrow.

Others are welcome to try it out and use it. Ideally we'd like to see it improved and extended. It already has some interesting features:

• Users can choose blocks of headlines, or headlines with summaries.
• Content can come from the site (stories, blogs, forums) or from RSS feeds.
• Users can add RSS feeds of their choice.
• Users can let other users view their custom pages (or not).
• The backend is "pluggable," so adding new types of content should be a snap.

Biggest item on my wish list would be drag/drop page reordering, via AJAX.

http://drupal.org/project/mysite/

I lost a lot of work in progress when my Compaq Evo laptop bit the dust, but the thing that has surprised me is how hard it's been to lose my RSS feeds. A key part of my job is keeping up with what's happening on the Internet, and suddenly I'm ... disconnected. Bam! Losing a couple of years' worth of email is hard; losing a huge list of RSS feeds turns out to be much harder.

I have an OPML file backed up ... from about a year ago. The best stuff came from the most recently added feeds. It's like losing part of your mind.

At a conference in pre-Katrina New Orleans, Nick Denton told me he has something like a thousand RSS feeds in his aggregator. Holy cow, I thought: That's not an aggregator, it's a lifestyle. Yeah. At some point I signed up for that lifestyle. Now I'm suffering withdrawal.