Playing with Lilina…
I’m currently playing around with the web-based RSS aggregator Lilina to act as a LiveJournal-less Friends page, and unfortunately, it leaves a lot to be desired. It does show promise however, but it needs a lot of polishing to get there.
One reason why I wanted Lilina rather than some other source is that I felt that I wanted a personal friends page that didn’t depend on LJ, should I end up transitioning entirely off, and secondly, no WordPress plugins currently do what I want (every one I’ve seen more or less adds ‘crosstalk’ by adding posts directly to this blog, or as a simple aggregator that JUST lists article titles).
Lilina, thus far, seems to be just right: a standalone program that is lightweight enough to act as a public friends page. However, it’s clearly very much alpha, and has issues to this end. Despite this, it seems to be the best available: Feed on Feeds is more like a desktop client than a lightweight browser, Gregarius is incredibly slow, and Zort doesn’t interleave articles from different feeds.
I’ve found quite a few minor bugs in just playing around with it for thirty minutes, and would definitely not recommend it unless you’re willing to get the latest SVN code and tinker with it to make it work (for one thing, it has a fundamental flaw that prevents Slashdot, of all things, from being successfully aggregated, and most probably many others as well).
I’ll keep tinkering with it perhaps, but I might just end up writing my own app, since Lilina’s design is a bit clunky.
It’s also reminded me that I need to upgrade the default installs of PHP and MySQL on this server up to 5 (for each)…
