SubscribeA friend told me the other day that she was speaking to someone about RSS feeds and he said he had five hundred feeds in his reader. While my aggregator is not that full, it is filling up everyday with new sources of information. Read on, because there is an AJAX enhanced website that will help you start dealing with this issue.
Bandnews is a website which aggregates music news live from the web and allows you to save your personal favorites or add new bands to track. Scout, which is the bandnews bot collects the news from official band websites and magazines so their website viewers can read all of the current news about their favorite bands on one page.
The Bandnews interface is lightning fast due to their use of XmlHttpRequests and as they say in their blog, “it allows client-server-communication while the currently loaded page remains unchanged”. Their AJAX features include a live search, add/remove bands function, login/registration and their band directory.
In a recent email Alex of Bandnews stated, “Unlike all the hyped websites we tried to use Ajax in an intelligent and useful way”. I couldn’t agree more!
Are live band podcasts next?
[Technorati tags: ajax, javascript]
An important point about Bandnews is that we are not just an RSS aggreator for band feeds. Less than one percent of the bands we have listed provide RSS. We have to deal with badly written html pages and news hidden in flash files. This is what makes Bandnews somewhat special in my eyes.
What is more: as we try to get the news from a band page as soon as they have been posted, we have spent a lot of effort to balance keeping an eye on every band (even that is not so easy) without over-crawling the page.
Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites. About Max...
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