No more NewsGator, no Google Reader API

So everyone heard earlier this week that NewsGator is shutting down their aggregator synchronising service and getting everyone to switch to Google Reader.

There are two big problems for me:

There are also other issues of course, like Google owning yet another piece of monopoly pie, but the others affect me more directly right now.

Both NetNewsWire and FeedDemon now have the ability to sync with Google Reader, but there’s no published API, so I can’t mirror their behaviour in my own Linux desktop aggregator. At best I could use Niall Kennedy’s work from 2005 or maybe code from pyrfeed which has some documentation from 2007. Neither is an option I would choose willingly.

Photo-frame dashbaord

In a comment on peterme.com over a year ago, I said

I’d like to see a personal dashboard being displayed through one of those digital wifi photo frames attached to the inside of my front door, so I can see the appointments my wife and I have got that day on my way out, plus other reminders based on previously gathered data. It can’t be far away, surely?

Apparently I was wrong, because I’ve not yet seen anyone doing this, but this kind of scenario came up at work the other day and, having forgotten suggesting it before, I suggested it again, in particular, using cron and imagemagick to take a screenshot of a web page, save it as an image and send it to the wifi photo frame.

This sounds terrifyingly doable, and semi-useful. If I could find a decent, cheap wifi photo frame, that might be something to keep me busy one weekend!