peat dot org

I’m posting articles from my daily reading to the @peatsreader account on Twitter.  The pieces are culled from my daily reading of several hundred news feeds, covering photography, architecture, economics, street art, software development, comics, and other odd topics that tickle my fancy or get me thinking.

It’s pretty low flow — 10 to 15 articles per day, and throttled at one tweet per hour to keep things fresh.

This is an experiment in combining three of my favorite activities:  I read voraciously, I enjoy sharing my interests with other people, and I tinkering with software and the Internet for a living.  Between my career and my family, I don’t always have time to blog or tweet or comment on the specific articles I enjoy, so I’ve written a tool that scrapes my reading list and publishes the notable articles for me.

For those of a technical persuasion, here’s how it fits together:

I use Google Reader to consume and organize hundreds of news feeds.  When I see an article I like, I share it on my public feed.  The tool checks the feed for new articles, and every hour one of the shared articles is published to the @peatsreader account.  Hooray for automation!

I’ll be happy to share the Ruby source on GitHub if there’s any interest.  In the meantime, follow @peatsreader and let me know what you think.

Last month I (finally) switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader. It works great from the desktop or the phone, but the feature that really motivated me to switch is sharing articles that are particularly entertaining or enlightening.

Here’s Peat’s shared items. You’ll probably notice I’m a fan of Boing Boing, Make Magazine, and a heap of odd nerdly things.

Feedburner says most of the people who read my blog are also using Google Reader, so if you’re sharing articles, I’d love to read ‘em!