alt Hacker NewsThe 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
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I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
this on an e-reader would be lovely. perhaps limiting the adding / removal of the source list to once a week or month would add another layer of purposefulness to it. want!
Kagi News does something similar, for what it's worth.
In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.