I’ve built a bridge between my RSS readers (Vienna and Tapestry) and my web browser so that I can connect my laptop to the Internet, fetch updated news stories, then disconnect. Later, while looking through the feed, I can queue up individual articles to be downloaded fully. Even later, I can connect the laptop to the Internet and run a script which will fetch all the queued articles to a folder on my laptop, open the local files in a browser, and clear out the queue. This allows me to do the actual reading of the full articles while being offline.
I think this is pretty cool, but I also note that while most of the components of this workflow existed already, the fact that I had to build the bit that collects the URLs to be fetched later suggests to me that the pool of people who want to do this is really, really small. I’d love to be proven wrong about this, and I will be working on cleaning up the URL collecting program and publishing it to the App Store at some point, just in case.
Today, though, I’m just so pleased that I got it to work that I had to post a bit of celebration.