Feed database server for Windows released
Monday, November 13th, 2006Fred Zelders just let me know that his FeedZcollector is now available for sale as version 1.0.
“FeedZcollector is an application that captures the content of web feeds (RSS, ATOM and RDF) at regular intervals. The content is stored in a Microsoft Access or MySQL database, ready for you to analyze, process or present.”
This is a freestanding feed collection application that runs on a Windows machine, and it has no user interface, other than the standard database query tools. That is the beauty of it, since Access gives you all the database presentation tools you could want. FeedZcollector can act as a back-end for a feed aggregator application, or collect data for a feed-based analysis system. This makes a lot of sense. I’ve struggled with a few Ruby and Perl libraries that had caching systems, and with FeedZcollector you can just use standard SQL queries in any Windows based language, without learning some undocumented library’s obscure functions. This type of discreet functionality is a great example of the developing feed ecosystem. Now we need a feed statistics module that can sit on top of this database and produce summary data with lots of cool graphs and visualizations.