Post | mennovanslooten.nl/blog

During June and July, I worked for a couple of weeks on an subscription-based news application. (not news as in RSS, but straight from the sources like Reuters etc.) After this project I gave a small presentation about the project to some of my Backbase colleagues, where it was generally agreed upon that this was one of the coolest applications we've built yet, not because it was huge and complex and intimidating, but because it was simple and it did its job very well.

We really wanted to show it to the general public because we thought it would make a great showcase of our technology, but to really appreciate it in action one would have to be subscribed so we didn't just want to do a demo. During the project I had already discussed the potential of this thing as an RSS reader with some other people working on it and my good colleague Simon (one of the people behind the Backbase website) took the trouble to actually make this reality. To adapt it to RSS he made some modifications, though; the original app was heavily based on storing user preferences and data in a session. For now, there's no storing of user modifications, searching has been disabled, as well as browsing back through the archives. It does something extra though: you can actually bookmark an article directly in the browser.

Unfortunately, noone can be told what the RSS reader does. You have to see it for yourself. Oh, and another cool thing: You can download the complete source code here. We've had many requests for an example+code of a complete, working application with Backbase. This is about as good as it gets!

By the way, I haven't checked the code yet, so I don't know how much of my original code is there (I only did the front-end code anyway). The design is almost completely mine (and not very pretty, I know) and was purely intended to make people forget they are visiting a webpage.