The web is an amazing place. There’s so much information available to people, and it increases exponentially. Aside from the sheer amount of information out there, there are many people who make it their career to present that information to others in a useful way. By useful I don’t only mean in a way that feels familiar or logical to people consuming the information, but rather people who want to present and maintain information beautifully. Beautiful information, its certain that the majority of us would rather not spend a lot of time in dank, dirty, litter strewn places in the physical; that mindset reflects how we want to interact on the web, on our devices and machines. While we want more and more to consume on the web, it takes a certain amount of effort to provide or contribute it; literally and beautifully.
I read a lot of RSS feeds, I traverse the web soaking in a lot of information on a daily basis. If your like me, and a lot of people out there, you just don’t have the time to go to every website to read your favorite news and articles; we aggregate.
Let me give you a look at a really awesome, open source, web-based application I just found. Installed. Fell in love with.
The application is called Managing News and it’s developed by a company named Phase 2 Technology. You may have heard of their open source web-based collaboration platform “Open Atrium” but that’s for another post (shit…am I name dropping or what?). Anyways aside from the other cool projects Phase 2 develops, Managing News is pretty spectacular. Not to mention the default Jack Theme is a brilliant UI, and easily customizable.
Managing News has a lot of great features which make it just a wonderful piece of software for personal and even public use. You can add as many feeds as you like to the system which combines all of them for a global latest news channel, or you can view each individual one, create new channels based on tags you define for feeds, pinpoint on a map where the article is referring to, and so much more…it’s just…awesome.
“So whats the catch,” you ask?
There is no catch. Like I previously stated the system is Open Source and released under a GNU GPL. The core of the system is built on Drupal, another really excellent and popular framework for building web applications.
You can obtain the latest release of ManagingNews from the official website. I would even suggest checking out Phase 2 Technologies as well.
